


Leopardspaw

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aurors, Humor, M/M, Magical Accidents, Magical Artifacts, Quest, Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-08 00:57:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 64,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/755115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ministry is very sorry that its latest mistake—an artifact that was supposed to let Aurors detect lies—blew up on Harry, and now he can detect lies every time someone tells one. (Inquiries are continuing). The Ministry is also sorry that they can’t tell Harry how long the effect would last. (Unspeakables are working around the clock). And the Ministry would probably be two times sorrier if they knew that Draco Malfoy has hired Harry to find his father, who’s escaped from Azkaban. (The Chosen One should be able to have a full and normal life).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Remains of an Artifact

**Author's Note:**

> Despite some angst and the fact that this is a mystery, it also has a fair amount of humor. The title is a variation on the term “catspaw.”

  
Harry buried his face in his hands, and groaned. The ability to detect lies was even more annoying when the lies were on _paper_.  
  
 _Dear Harry,  
  
I know you don’t know me, but I’ve done work for years with Veritaserum and improving other potions that could arrange for a patient to tell the truth without doing the violence to the patient’s psyche that Veritaserum does. I would love to arrange a meeting with you so that we can talk about the ways that your situation could help, and how you do and do not resemble a patient under Veritaserum…_  
  
Harry eyed the letter with the bleariness caused by a long night of drinking. The alcohol did nothing to stop the magic plaguing him, but Harry continued because, at least by the time he was unconscious, he wasn’t awake to hear or read falsehoods, either. The first sentence was okay, but the “Dear” before the salutation and various words in the second sentence, especially “arrange,” glowed bright red.  
  
“You’re a researcher, and you want to benefit from nasty magical accidents, and you don’t _care_ what the fuck happens to me,” Harry said aloud, and let his head fall back on the pillow propped on the arm of his couch. “That’s what _that_ means.”  
  
He crumpled the letter up and threw it away, into the giant stack of parchment that leaned against the wall of his drawing room. He could have _Incendioed_ it at any time, or raked it all into the fireplace and got rid of it that way, and he knew it, but he liked the look of it sitting there. Sometimes he thought he was getting too complacent about his place as the Boy-Who-Lived in the wizarding world, too used to recoiling from his cynicism and thinking, _Oh, no, sure there aren’t_ that _many people out there who see me as a meal ticket._  
  
The pile would remind him that, yes, his cynicism was wrong. By not being deep enough.  
  
Harry tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. Then he stared at his hands. They hadn’t changed since that day when the Ministry’s latest experimental artifact—  
  
(And when had they started trusting the Unspeakables to _invent_ things, instead of just studying mysteries invented by other people? If they wanted inventors, they had George and Ron for that).  
  
\--exploded on him. There was a deep black stain on his thumb and his palm, which he had flung up in front of him to try and get the artifact away when it had started bursting with sparks. Lesser dark marks, rather like ink, with shades of purple in them, covered the insides of his other fingers. And the same marks had repeated on the left hand, even though he hadn’t been holding the damn silver ball in _that_ one.  
  
Harry had spent three days with Unspeakables clucking over him, analyzing the marks and asking him about the sensations he’d felt when the artifact burst apart and telling him long, earnest, boring stories of other people who had been afflicted by similar spells. And then he’d gone to Kingsley and announced that he was bloody taking a bloody leave of bloody absence, and he would hex anyone who tried to stop him. Kingsley had agreed, perhaps to stop objects from rotating around his office like satellites around the moon.  
  
And then Harry had ended up here. At home. With nothing much to do except field the letters that came from people who had heard about his stupid truth-telling ability—because of course the Unspeakables couldn’t keep that quiet, of _course_ not—and wanted him to make their fortunes or change their lives.  
  
Or marry them. The marriage proposals had never stopped since he defeated Voldemort, really, but this had increased them when they’d been quiet for a little while. Harry shook his head. He himself knew he was no catch. Oh, sure, there was the fame, and the scar and the eyes that some people were apparently crazy about, but who _really_ wanted a spouse who would always know when they were lying?  
  
And who would want one who flinched out of his sleep with weird dreams, and felt the stirrings of the Horcrux in him on the anniversary of the day he had destroyed it each year, and sometimes woke gasping from a nightmare that turned out to be the truth, predicting a particularly hideous future? Hermione had told him he was probably a natural Seer of some kind and had urged him to go get studied, but Harry had chosen the right, withering words for that idea, and she’d given it up.  
  
 _That’s another thing,_ Harry thought, rubbing his forehead and yawning. _Who would want a husband with an absolutely horrible temper, either?_  
  
At first, the leave of absence had been nice. The Ministry tended to give him their hardest cases, because then the prestige when he solved them was greater and made the Ministry officials look so much wiser, and Harry had lived and overflowed with his work for the past two years. But now…  
  
Now, he was _bored._  
  
There were only so many mornings he could sleep in, only so many meals he could cook for hours and then eat, only so much post to sort through.  
  
Harry stood and wandered into his kitchen. There were pots everywhere, even though he’d scrubbed his counters after his latest disastrous encounter with that particular roasted chicken recipe that Molly had lent him, and so at least those were gleaming. (One day, Harry promised himself, he would get the stupid chicken right). Harry eyed all of them, and sighed. No, he was really and truly bored. Not even the thought of dumping a lot of ingredients into one pot and seeing how bad he could get them to smell cheered him up.  
  
The fireplace blazed. Harry turned towards it and dragged the nearest chair over so he could sit comfortably.  
  
“Mate.” Ron grinned at him out of the flames. “Changed your mind and decided to come into the ranks of the _truly_ happy?”  
  
“You go to hell,” Harry told him gently. “Yeah, I’m bored, but being a test subject for you and George is worse.”  
  
Ron just shook his head. Harry couldn’t be sure, but he thought Ron’s hair was purple at the moment, and he had a large, darkening bruise under his cheekbone. Harry snorted. Sure, he’d been wounded on cases and he had those bloody marks on his hands, but at least he didn’t deliberately get injured on the job and call it fun.  
  
“Actually,” Ron said, stretching the words out, “there is something you could help us with that wouldn’t lead to any physical danger.”  
  
Harry eyed him narrowly. Ron would have glowed red if he was lying. Harry had tested the effect during those first three days when it was still interesting, and it didn’t matter if the person in question was surrounded by flames in a firecall, under an Invisibility Cloak, or in another room. The red glow would still reveal them. Harry reckoned it would be of great use if he was ever stalked by invisible assassins who were also in the habit of talking aloud to themselves, and not many other times. “What is it?” he asked.  
  
“George’s latest idea is this orange powder you eat, and it turns everything you say into a funny story,” Ron said happily. “But sometimes it just makes you say embarrassing things instead. We want you there to make sure those things are lies—”  
  
He stopped. He stuttered. He said, “Er, it was an idea, right? See you, mate.” And the fire flared, and shut.  
  
Harry shook his head. He still didn’t know exactly what his face looked like when he got angry, but it worked.  
  
And he wasn’t as angry at Ron as he would have been at someone else assuming that what he _really_ wanted was to use his ability to detect lies for their benefit. Ron was his best friend, and that stayed the same no matter where he worked, or what he wanted Harry to do. Or what expressions he could be intimidated with.  
  
Harry stood up and crossed out of the kitchen, into the drawing room, and over to the small door set in the wall opposite the bedroom. If he was really this bored, he could always find something to do in the training room. Locked with several dozen kinds of wards, the door was, but it all melted away at his touch. It would be bloody inconvenient to be kept out of a place in his own house.  
  
And the room had more kinds of wards on it still, to prevent the Ministry or any of his neighbors from detecting the experimental spells, hexes, and curses he performed in it. Maybe it was time to see if he could get the Slashing Hex right.  
  
*  
  
Harry sighed as he stepped out of the training room and brushed the straw and red powder clinging to his robes off. That was the remains of one sorry target. Harry liked to conjure ones that were made of straw but also had a red liquid flowing through the sacks that surrounded them, so he knew the blood patterns his spells would make.  
  
(He couldn’t do anything _too_ violent, after all. The Ministry was as careful of his virgin reputation as a whole herd of unicorns).  
  
 _A shower,_ Harry thought, as he strolled towards the bathroom. A long, hot one that would make his muscles feel like they were melting. Then he would sit on the couch and eat his dinner, and perhaps then there would be something interesting on the telly. He hadn’t believed he would ever watch the one Hermione had got him—he’d essentially grown up without it, since Dudley wouldn’t let him watch it anyway—but he’d grown fond of a couple of ridiculous programmes.   
  
Then he saw the owl waiting on the perch for guest owls at the far side of the room.  
  
Harry paused and scowled at it. It was a magnificent bird, silvery-grey, with black tips to the feathers, but that only made it more annoying, because its owner was probably someone who thought they were too important to be dismissed by anyone, even a tired Chosen One. Then he would have to deal with screaming Howlers.  
  
But the owl didn’t take the hint and leave, so Harry sighed and held out his arm. The sooner he dealt with this, the sooner he could be alone.  
  
The owl took flight in absolute silence. Well, of course, all its kind did, but for some reason, Harry had the impression as it settled on his arm with heavy grace that it was more elegant silence, a different kind, a—  
  
 _Another side-effect for the Unspeakables to note, then,_ Harry thought, as he ripped the envelope from the owl’s hold. _After a few days, I become delusional and start composing poetic rhapsodies to owls._  
  
He opened the envelope, and scanned the letter inside. Then he scanned it again. Then he cast some charms that would detect not only Dark curses on the letter, but charms on his vision, because he couldn’t possibly be seeing what he thought he was.  
  
But whatever delusions he had, they included imagining fake signatures and obviously fake petitions for help from former Death Eaters along with elegant owls. Harry idly wondered if they would name this new disorder after him. He rather fancied the name _Harryitis_ messing up some neat Healer’s files somewhere.  
  
 _Dear Potter,  
  
I heard about your accident. I imagine that you’ve received a lot of pleas by now, and demands that you participate in experiments, and even marriage proposals. (I read once that you’ve had three thousand of them in the last five years. I wouldn’t believe it, but I do, if only because there are people capable of writing one more than once).  
  
The Ministry may have told you this already, but I doubt it, because my spies say they haven’t spread the news beyond immediate family members. My father has escaped Azkaban. They know he didn’t have an Animagus form, and so they came to me, assuming I must have helped. I did not. They are hunting him in other places, but the longer the hunt takes, the more likely that someone will die in the confrontation, either my father or someone he will kill to stay free.  
  
I have some leads. However, they point in all directions, and the people whom I have talked to are ones that I do not know as well as my own allies; they are my father’s, or people connected to the Dark Lord whom I never saw among the Death Eaters. I do not have the time to sort through their lies and exaggerations and find the truth._  
  
 _I would like you to join me and give me the benefit of your abilities. I would pay you well.  
  
Draco Malfoy._  
  
Harry tapped the letter against his teeth for a minute, imagined the way that Malfoy would probably react to the sight of him doing that, and laughed. When he glanced up, he realized that the grey owl was still there, on the perch, staring at him, and scraping the perch with an impatient claw that probably resembled Malfoy’s fingers.  
  
“Of course he probably put a spell on you that would make other people think his owl flew more elegantly than other people’s,” Harry told it. “Of _course_ he did.”  
  
The owl ruffled up its feathers and only stared back. Harry rolled his eyes and opened the letter to look at it again.  
  
He really shouldn’t be considering it. For one thing, Ron would never let him hear the end of it if he knew that Harry had accepted the git’s offer but wouldn’t help him and George with their orange powder test. For another, Harry wondered why in the world Malfoy wanted to capture his father instead of leave him free, and finding out would involve having to work his way through more tedious lies.  
  
And for a third, leaving his flat while he still had this ability would involve him in overhearing lots of lies even if Malfoy never told any. He was so _tired_ of red. He would at least have enjoyed it a little more if the lies manifested in a rainbow. White for white lies, perhaps, and indigo for lies of omission, and red only for those that were intended to be malicious…  
  
When he came out of that trance, Harry looked down at the letter and cocked his head.  
  
But there were two excellent reasons for him to accept this, really. They were reasons that might make no sense to anyone but him, but Harry was accountable to himself only right now.   
  
He was so bored that Malfoy’s letter provided a diversion. It also offered recompense, and none of the others had.  
  
And it was the first letter he had received that didn’t have at least one lie buried in it.  
  
He sat down and began to scrawl the response the owl was so clearly waiting for. There was nothing that said he _had_ to do this, but he wanted to at least meet with Malfoy and see what was happening. If Malfoy told him a lie in person or made it clear that the offer of payment was conditional on doing something Harry had no interest in, then he could drop it.  
  
When the owl flew away with his envelope, Harry found he was smiling. He hadn’t tested his ability on someone he knew he could annoy before, only people who annoyed him. Perhaps it would be extra fun to find out if Malfoy had changed in the years since they last saw each other, and whether he would give Harry that look that made it seem as though his breaking Harry’s nose in sixth year was what he’d like to do _all the time._  
  
 _Now, about that shower._  
  
Yes, it was the shower for him, and then an evening full of wedding and betrayals. So many of the people on the programme would lie that it would shroud the telly in a continuous red glow, but Harry found that almost soothing. At least they cared more about their own lives than what he could do for them.   
  
Harry thought everyone should live like that.


	2. An Extraordinary Meeting

  
_Chapter Two—An Extraordinary Meeting_  
  
Harry shaded his eyes and shook his head. No, no matter how long he spent watching the other patrons in the Leaky Cauldron, the shade of red around their heads as they boasted and bragged and lied didn’t change.  
  
 _The Unspeakables could have tried harder to invent a different color._  
  
Not that they knew what they were doing in the first place, Harry thought as he swallowed an enormous gulp of butterbeer, inventing an artifact that was supposed to allow Aurors to detect lies and making it something that could explode. Why wouldn’t they _test_ it first?  
  
Oh, right, this was the wizarding world, and they were allergic to logic, as Hermione would say. Harry shook his head. He wondered whether he would be happier living in the Muggle world if his little problem didn’t get fixed. He would see just as many lies there, as the programmes on the telly proved, but there would be no one running around telling him earnestly that magical artifacts were _perfectly safe_ when they weren’t.  
  
There was a motion behind him, and Harry turned around, wondering if it would be Malfoy. He was the one who had wanted to meet in this pub at one-o’clock on a Tuesday, but he was late.  
  
Instead, he saw an owl—and not the elegant grey bird that Malfoy favored for the delivery of his messages, either. This one was an ordinary brown color, with eyes that looked as if they crossed. Harry sighed and held out his hand for the letter. The owl fluttered randomly around his head before finally landing on his arm and dropping its envelope into his hand. Harry noticed the Ministry seal on it and rolled his eyes, but reached for a bit of his meal to give the owl anyway. It wasn’t the bird’s fault that it served a stupid master.  
  
 _You’d think it’s my fault, if anything. I know what the Ministry’s like, and I go on working for them anyway._  
  
He foisted the owl off with some crumbs of bread and bacon, and tore open the envelope, taking some satisfaction in cracking the seal right down the middle. A few people looked over, twisting their heads as if they could somehow make it casual, and twisted right back again when they caught Harry’s stare instead.  
  
Harry looked at the signature first, and snorted when he noticed the _Sincerely_ was glowing red. Well, _yeah_.  
  
The name wasn’t one he recognized—Lancelot Youngblood. But the quick skim he’d taken of the letter said that he was one of Kingsley’s Under-Secretaries, which was less surprising. Kingsley had decided to take the opposite approach to the problem that Cornelius Fudge had created by making a post of Special Under-Secretary to the Minister that someone could get into and use to cause havoc. Instead, Kingsley had so many secretaries writing for him and handling his business that no one could keep track of them all. Harry approved. It also meant that people couldn’t figure out who to bribe.  
  
The letter, when he smoothed it out and read it, proved to be full of lies every third word or so. So this Lancelot had no great talent for the job he was supposed to handle, then. But that was so usual in the Ministry that it was almost comforting, rather than otherwise.  
  
 _Dear Auror Potter,  
  
You may not know me, but I’m your Ministry contact for the duration of this disaster._  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows, impressed despite himself. In the whole letter so far, only the “Dear” was a lie.  
  
 _It’s my job to let you know the latest things that the Unspeakables have discovered about the artifact, and how they plan to free you of the stains on your hands—as soon as possible, let me assure you! No one wants to see you endure this time-consuming and tiresome problem longer than necessary._  
  
Harry sighed and took another drink. “And you were doing so well,” he told Youngblood. “Or maybe no one told you that I can detect lies in written words, too. Or you’re so naïve as to think that I really have no enemies in the Ministry, no matter what someone else says.” He hoped that last wasn’t the case, for Youngblood’s own sake. He wouldn’t survive the sea of Ministry politics without more sophistication.  
  
 _The Unspeakables have currently determined that all combinations of water will not work in washing away the stain._  
  
“No shit,” Harry muttered. They had determined that before he even left the building after the first three days were up. He took another sip of his butterbeer, and ignored the way that Tom frowned at him. Harry attracted more business than he drove away, people hovering in the corners to look at him or gather up their courage to try and approach him about one of the “business opportunities” that had sprouted in their minds since Harry’s little problem occurred.  
  
 _They have also determined that combinations of vinegar, nightsoil, wine, beer, and whisky do not work._  
  
Harry arched an eyebrow. For some reason, the only word in that whole line that glowed red was “vinegar.” He decided idly to try that when he went home. If the Unspeakables hadn’t tried it just because they thought it wouldn’t work, that was all the more reason for him to do so.  
  
And if they hadn’t used it because they thought that it might react explosively to the artifact’s residue, then Harry _really_ wanted to hurry up and make the test. He needed a little excitement in his life.  
  
 _We hope that you will continue to inform the Ministry of your plans in the future, and come in soon, so that the Unspeakables can resume their tests and learn from you what they should be doing next._  
  
“Nothing, you morons,” Harry muttered, focusing on the nice shade of scarlet that “learn from you” and the “Sincerely” above the signature blazed. Yeah, right, they wanted him there to _learn_ from him, instead of harness him up like a captive animal and drain all the blood and all the magic they could from him. Harry had had a lot of reasons for leaving when he did, including the deep belief that the Unspeakables were wankers, but he had also caught a few of them trying to save his hair for use in Polyjuice Potions. Which, as he had explained to them with a few nice words and a lot of not-so-nice incantations, was _not_ on.  
  
“I don’t know that you need me to break in. You sound as though you’re having a nice conversation by yourself.”  
  
Harry whirled around before he could stop himself, calculating distances, calculating angles, and knowing exactly how he would use the table as a shield if Malfoy attacked. And then he forcibly calmed himself, raised his eyebrows at Malfoy instead, and cocked his head to the side as he realized that Malfoy was simply standing there, his arms folded.   
  
And no red glow surrounding him.  
  
Malfoy had grown taller than Harry remembered him, taller than his father. His blond hair hung around his face in a sleek, straight fall, and his face looked less pointy than it had. He was wearing exquisitely-tailored pale robes, though, and he sneered at Harry’s jeans and trainers. That made Harry relax. Certain things would never change.  
  
“Malfoy.” He ignored the open stares around him as he charmed the chair on the opposite side of the table to pull out for the git. Everything he did would end up on the front page of the _Prophet_ anyway, he might as well do what he wanted and deal with the fallout. “Fancy a seat?”  
  
Malfoy took it with a graceful economy of motion that made Harry purse his lips in reluctant admiration. He would have made a good Auror; he could have outdone some of the ones that Harry knew in reflexes and speed, and that was the highest compliment Harry could give. “ _Butterbeer_ , Potter?”  
  
Harry cocked his head further when he realized that there was still no red glow there. Malfoy should have sneered at what he was drinking while secretly reveling in the fact that Potter was drinking the lower-class beer that he’d always thought he should. Instead, Malfoy sounded as though he had expected a harder liquor.  
  
“No,” Harry said calmly. “I didn’t know how this meeting would go, and Firewhisky gets me drunk.”  
  
“Useful information.”  
  
And _again,_ Malfoy didn’t glow crimson. Harry shook his head. Malfoy hadn’t bridled his sneer at Harry’s clothes, or even tried. That meant he had no reason to restrain his sarcasm. But still, here he was, saying all these things that should have come across as false or at least not what they seemed on the surface, and they didn’t show up that way. _Huh_.  
  
“If you say so,” he said placidly. “Do you want Firewhisky?”  
  
“I can pay for it.” Malfoy flashed Galleons between his fingers, and pushed his chair back as if he would go to the bar.  
  
“I know, but I thought I’d offer.”  
  
Malfoy paused and studied him as though Harry was as great a mystery to him as he was to Harry. Harry leaned back and grinned at him. Malfoy probably thought that because they were having a halfway civil conversation at the moment. Let him be around Harry for any length of time, and he would find out that Harry’s honesty was just another weapon.  
  
“Interesting,” Malfoy said, and walked away with no red glow continuing to sprout around him.  
  
Harry leaned back, shaking his head, and clucked his tongue. He waited until Malfoy came back to say anything more, but watched the way he moved, and was quietly impressed. So many of the people Harry knew, now that was an Auror, looked simply _off_ when they were walking or running or even doing such simple things as standing still. They didn’t have the training that Harry did, the ability to explode in any direction on a moment’s notice, the quickness with their wands. Harry would find himself thinking about how they would survive if dropped in a battle situation, and then had to remember that for most of them, battle situations were _not_ everyday life.  
  
Malfoy would do well. He came back to the table and sat there sipping his Firewhisky, and even the motions of his arms and elbows were right, relaxed enough not to hurt his muscles with tension but not so loose that he couldn’t get his wand up in time. And Harry knew that he wouldn’t drink too much, either.  
  
“So let me get this right,” Harry said. “You want my help to find your father and haul him back to Azkaban?” If there was a lie to such a direct question, he would walk out the door. Disappointedly, but he’d walk.  
  
Malfoy nodded. “I want him to go back to prison because he’ll take over my life if he’s out for long,” he corrected himself, probably because he had noticed Harry watching him. “The hunt for him, and watching over my shoulder for him in case he decides to come home. I don’t want that. I want my own life, outside his clutches.”  
  
A surge of fellow feeling struck Harry so strongly that it nearly took him off his feet like an ocean wave. He lifted his mug to Malfoy, smiling. And no lies. Even if Malfoy had managed to find a way to baffle the magic somehow, which seemed more likely at the moment than him making that long a speech without lying, Harry still had to salute him. Maybe he could teach that magic to Harry if Harry paid him enough, and then Harry could use it to find some way out of his little problem.  
  
“All right,” Harry said. “But I don’t know if it’s going to work the way you want it to. After all, one sight of my face would send most people running, especially people as skittish as your contacts will probably be. Especially since the news about _this_ is all over the wizarding world,” he added, and turned his palms towards Malfoy so that he could see the dark stain that covered them.  
  
Malfoy leaned across the table and caught his left hand instead of leaning back. Harry blinked. Most people didn’t want to touch the stained skin, as if assuming they would catch the spell, although the Unspeakables had done more than enough tests to prove that couldn’t happen. Harry didn’t blame them. The stain was damn ugly, the color of ink when you first looked at it but worse the longer you went on looking.  
  
But Malfoy cradled Harry’s hand in his and peered at it intently, his breath light and easy as he played his fingers over Harry’s palm, his nails scraping at the heel of the hand as though he thought he could find a place to begin unraveling the purple splash there. Harry squirmed. He had discovered since the war, or at least since he completed Auror training and began noticing the way people moved, that he was then _attracted_ to people who moved like that.  
  
Having one of them touching him was too intimate an experience, one that made him want to take back the hand before Malfoy had clearly finished with it.  
  
But then he thought of how Malfoy would react if he realized Harry was hard, and the laughter broke from him. Malfoy looked up, head tilted and face frozen.  
  
“Are you laughing at me?” he asked.  
  
Harry shook his head, and smiled at him. “No,” he said. “At myself. I was having an absurd thought, one that made me anxious, about you, and then I thought about your expression if I ever _told_ that thought to you.”  
  
“Really.” Malfoy leaned nearer towards him, as though he knew that Harry wouldn’t want anyone around them to overhear—no, as though he _cared_ that Harry wouldn’t want anyone around them to overhear. “What was the thought?”  
  
Harry hesitated. But he had taken truth as his own duty since he got this stupid stain, and he wanted to compare Malfoy’s real expression with the imagined one that had made him laugh.  
  
“That having you look at my hand that way feels bloody good,” he said.  
  
Malfoy gave one tiny jerk, as though Harry had hit him on the shoulder. Then he leaned back in his chair and quirked one eyebrow up.  
  
“Someone has not touched you enough,” he said.  
  
And, again, that was really what he thought. Harry’s erection twitched, and he had to resist the urge to lick his lips, which Malfoy would almost certainly take the wrong way now. This was _thrilling._ Why couldn’t everyone be honest around him all the time? Maybe everyone who did that would be attractive, now, when he had the curse to make him see it if they weren’t.  
  
“I don’t have a partner right now,” Harry said.  
  
“Of course not, as an Auror out of work.”  
  
Malfoy flashed a corner of a tooth when he smiled, and Harry had to blink so that he wouldn’t sit there simply staring like an enchanted idiot. “No,” he said. “I meant a partner in the boyfriend or girlfriend sense. So it’s not someone’s specific fault that they haven’t touched me. It’s just my fault for not getting fucked enough.”  
  
Malfoy’s hand came down on the table, and Harry jumped. Was he going to make no swearing a condition for working with him? At the moment, Harry was bedazzled enough that he would even have promised to honor that.  
  
But instead, Malfoy bit the corner of his lip while his cheeks turned slightly pink. He was concealing _laughter_?  
  
“Well,” Malfoy said, shaking his head at last. “It doesn’t matter.” And Harry could relax again, because that was true; it was just something that had happened, that Harry had admitted, and Malfoy could let it go. “I can pay you in one of two ways: Galleons, or information that would lead you to a Potions master who might be able to help you with a cure. Which do you—”  
  
“The contact information,” Harry said at once, firmly. And Malfoy looked at him again as if he hadn’t expected the answer, which made Harry relieved, to have found something about his new idol that _didn’t_ impress him. Of course Harry wanted to be free of this curse more than he wanted money. Who wouldn’t?  
  
“Hmmm,” Malfoy said at last, and then no more about it. “Well. It seems that you’ve agreed to help me. Shall we begin the hunt?” He swallowed most of his Firewhisky in a single swallow that didn’t look like a gulp, for some reason, and then pushed his chair back and stood, eyes on Harry.  
  
 _Does he think that after everything we’ve just talked about, I would disdain to walk out of a pub at his side?_ Harry thought, but he knew people made odd distinctions in their minds. After you’d listened to Dark wizards talk earnestly about how they hadn’t _murdered_ people, they had just _stopped their process of living,_ you got used to hearing about those distinctions.  
  
He stood up and cocked his head, enjoying the way that Malfoy’s muscles flexed in the slim hips, just visible over the curve of his grey trousers. “Let’s go.”


	3. Contacts and Contact

  
_Chapter Three—Contacts and Contact_  
  
“Careful, Malfoy. Remember that you’ll be bringing _me_ with you before you Apparate anywhere.”  
  
Malfoy paused and tilted his head at Harry in a way that made him seem like the grey owl who had borne his letter: graceful, aggressive, but a kind of _poised_ aggression. Harry snorted to himself as he realized the comparison he was making. _And I’m sure the mice his owl kills are grateful that it’s a_ beautiful _predator killing them._  
  
“Why would I need to be careful about that in particular, Potter?” Malfoy asked quietly.  
  
Harry sighed and stifled the temptation to bury his head in his hands. Still no lies, and still no sign that Malfoy had even been tempted to tell one. He was going to shame Harry into respecting him in the end, wasn’t he?  
  
“I mean,” he said, “that your father’s contacts might hang around places where I would be required to—react to what’s in front of me. I’m still an Auror. I don’t want to lose you people who matter to your business because I have to charge into the middle of their illegal blackmail or trading and arrest them.”  
  
Malfoy watched him in silence some more. Part of the reason he could tell the truth, Harry thought, matching him stare for stare, was that he was so _slow_ to react to anything. He didn’t leap to deny Harry’s words, or laugh at them, or find an excuse for them. He simply absorbed, and weighed, and measured.  
  
Harry pictured him with a pair of invisible scales, and snickered.  
  
“You’re not an Auror for right now,” Malfoy said.  
  
 _True because he believes it,_ Harry noted. His curse didn’t pick up lies that people believed were true, no matter how stupid they self-evidently were. Harry knew that because the magic hadn’t made the Unspeakables glow red when they pronounced confidently that they would have Harry’s problem solved in a day.  
  
“What am I, then?” Harry asked.  
  
“You’re my paid investigator,” Malfoy said, and still the air around him was clear and not red with the force of his belief.  
  
Harry had to smile. He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d lacked _confident_ people in his life. Yes, fine, Malfoy was arrogant and still swaggered and had had some kind of training to make him _move_ like that that Harry might end up regretting later, if Malfoy used it to get the jump on him and hold a wand to Harry’s throat. But still, he was magnificent in the simplicity of his arrogance, in the way that he made assumptions without apology.  
  
It made Harry wonder if he’d have responded to some of those pleas for his help and time, or Ron’s suggestion that he help with the orange powder test, if those people had showed up and commanded him to aid them.  
  
 _No._ He knew the answer, ringing in his bones. _For whatever reason, this reaction is Malfoy’s alone._  
  
“I see.” Harry let his voice match Malfoy’s, go into the softness and secrecy that seemed appropriate for this hidden alley behind the Leaky Cauldron. Water plashed and dripped here, and shadows crept along the walls. Harry could see strange-smelling pieces of rubbish that he didn’t want to investigate more closely piled in those shadows. Strange how different even the most ordinary places could seem when he was looking at them with eyes that didn’t belong to an Auror. “So you’ll expect me to let someone with dragon’s eggs on him go?”  
  
“If he brings out the dragon’s eggs, someone else will steal them,” Malfoy said. “You don’t need to worry about honor among thieves.”  
  
“You speak such good sense,” Harry said, unable to help himself. “The Ministry ought to hire you as an advisor.”  
  
Malfoy paused to study him again. Then he shook his head. “I’d prefer that you not insult me,” he said, and extended his arm for Harry to take. Harry did, and thrilled this time to the muscles that bunched beneath his touch, the way Malfoy seemed to hiss in and out when Harry touched him.  
  
“Most people don’t find it insulting to be told they’d be good at something,” Harry said, tilting his head at Malfoy until his mouth was by Malfoy’s ear. “Or did you learn how to take compliments from Snape?”  
  
Malfoy looked at him and said, “Don’t speak that name around me.”  
  
“I went through a period like that, too,” Harry said, having to smile at the memory of how very _guilt-ridden_ he had been. “All right, I won’t.”  
  
Malfoy frowned.  
  
“You’re the boss,” Harry said. He joggled Malfoy’s arm when Malfoy didn’t move. “You were going to Side-Along Apparate me,” he reminded the git helpfully. And if he couldn’t do any investigating or reacting to what he saw right now, well, he would do his best to remember the Apparition coordinates. There was a difference between not making trouble for Malfoy and letting a murder or rape or kidnapping go unpunished.  
  
“I’m insulted because I would never work for the Ministry,” Malfoy said abruptly.  
  
Harry smiled again. “Oh, well,” he said. “That’s another reason for you to want your father back in prison, I suppose. There must be people out there who assumed you’d carry right on from where you father left, and make yourself useful as a blackmailer and contact in the Ministry.”   
  
Malfoy was very still now, even the flesh beneath Harry’s arm seeming to go cold and glass-like and retreat. Harry stroked his arm in apology and murmured, “Sorry. I’ll be quiet if you want. I just can’t lose the mind and the instincts of an Auror, even if I lose the habits of one.”  
  
He thought he heard Malfoy sigh quietly before they vanished, but he was standing very close, and no breath ruffled his hair. Perhaps he simply wished to feel it.  
  
*  
  
They appeared in a dense and densely green patch of trees, with rain dripping around them. Harry muttered and turned up his collar to keep the water from sliding down his neck. Next to him, Malfoy’s hand glided out and landed on the middle of his back for a moment.  
  
“I’m going to use a glamour to disguise your appearance,” he murmured. “Do not start. It ruins my aim.”  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows. “You ought to know that no glamour sticks to that bloody scar of mine.”  
  
“I _ought_ to have known?” Malfoy’s arm came up in a slow sweep that made Harry lick his lips, and his wand ended up at the level of Harry’s heart. “Do you imagine that I keep tabs on you at all times, that you are the center of my life in the way that you look at me as if I were the center of yours?”  
  
“Am I being that obvious?” Harry shrugged, deciding that he could talk about it if Malfoy had noticed it. “Sorry. I do find you attractive, but I wouldn’t try to touch you without your permission. I did like touching you when you Apparated me, though,” he added, because there was the chance Malfoy would do it again if he knew Harry liked it.  
  
Malfoy watched him still, and then dropped his wand and said, “You meant that I should know because otherwise I would try a glamour on the scar and be frustrated when it didn’t work.”  
  
Harry smiled at him. “Exactly.”  
  
Malfoy carried on watching him, as though he assumed that would unnerve Harry. Harry just looked back. He could stare at Malfoy forever, admire the curve of his jaw and neck and the way he held his wand in those long, lovely, gentle fingers.  
  
Then Malfoy said, “Very well. I’ll grow your hair longer, and that should help keep the scar concealed.”  
  
Harry nodded, and watched as Malfoy made the gesture, his arm unfolding and then springing back in towards his side as if he had cast a net at Harry. That motion was natural, too, unaffected, or at least only affected by the long practice he had undergone, and what Harry thought must be training by a dance master. The Auror training program had included the most common dance steps, both because the Aurors thought it would be useful for their trainees at parties and to give them some more balance and grace.  
  
 _But you’re not an Auror right now, remember?_  
  
Harry closed his eyes and smiled as he felt the glamour settle over him. That was right. He was free of the expectations that the Ministry placed on him, the duties and burdens. He only had to do what Malfoy said.  
  
The glamour tightened around his magic, and then a second spell followed, intricately interwoven with the first. Harry felt his fringe grow longer and flop down his forehead like a shaggy dog’s. The tickling sensation made him laugh and shake his head, growing used to the weight after a moment.  
  
“You are nothing like I expected,” Malfoy said.  
  
Harry snapped his head up, thinking he must have caught a lie at last, but the air around Malfoy was still unstained by scarlet. “I don’t see how,” he said. “You’ve told the truth so far, even about the things that made you sneer. I must fit your expectations somehow, or you would have lied more often.”  
  
“You think I would lie out of _surprise_?” Malfoy’s body flowed into a dreadfully still pose, his head uplifted as though he’d set up steel poles running from his chin to his shoulder. Harry preferred the grace he’d shown before, but this was nice, too. He reached out and touched Malfoy’s hand, playing with his fingers, making him start and shy and drop back into that motion.  
  
“No,” he said. “I just thought that last statement couldn’t be true, combined with the others that you were making earlier.”  
  
“Hm.” Malfoy spent some more time looking at him, and then nodded and turned to walk out of the grove. “Let’s go. We’re probably late.”  
  
Harry smiled as he trod softly after Malfoy. He suspected the adverb was the only word that kept that last statement from being a lie, but, well, it was truth as it stood, and a worthier gift than most people around him had offered him in the last fortnight.  
  
The rain continued to whisper and drip around him, and Harry caught the sound of voices beyond it for the first time. He shifted his wand casually to his hand. Malfoy could order him not to use certain curses, and Harry had to agree that tying someone’s legs around their heads or breaking their teeth might be a bit extreme for a first strike. But letting someone else curse him because his wand was tangled up in his sleeve would be stupid enough that he would die of embarrassment, and then Malfoy would have no help.  
  
 _He promised to pay me. I want to make sure that he sees no reason to skimp on the price._  
  
That wasn’t his real motive, of course, but Harry sometimes enjoyed lying to himself.   
  
*  
  
The trees ran out gradually, dribbling out in an area that looked like the grounds around Hogwarts, minus the lake. Harry saw a few crude houses here and there, with wooden walls that needed repairs and thatch that needed burning. The center of the meadow glowed with a bonfire, and Harry narrowed his eyes. There were edges to the dancing shadows, edges that burned as green as the Killing Curse and then vanished.  
  
“Follow me,” Malfoy said, not looking over his shoulder as he walked towards the fire. “You aren’t to say anything.”  
  
Harry nodded at Malfoy’s back, decided that spells wouldn’t fall under that ban, and followed. The shadows swept over him, and the glamour tingled and rebounded against his hands and face, but seemed to hold. At least, none of the roughly-cloaked wizards who turned and stared at them seemed inclined to start screaming about Harry Potter in their midst.  
  
The figures included both wizards and witches, Harry saw, but almost no children. There was one woman holding a little boy by the hand, but when the boy turned and looked at Harry, Harry saw a blank, porcelain-smooth face with a fixed smile and hair like black wires. He shuddered and sped up. Technically, the magic that made those child-figures wasn’t illegal; they were only objects and couldn’t feel or experience anything. He found them creepy anyway.  
  
He could smell it now, the heavy fumes of potions made with dragon scales and skins and eggs. It was always distinctive around the homes of the Potions brewers he hunted. Harry snorted softly and kept his eyes straight ahead. If the Potions masters who wanted those materials could find some way to get them without hurting dragons, he wouldn’t care so much. He preferred more exciting cases than the smuggling ones.  
  
There was a wizard standing next to a smaller fire and stroking the neck of a unicorn. Well, what _would_ have been a unicorn. It had a sleek black coat, the color and consistency of metal, and the horn that rose above its brow was subdivided into three sections, red and white and black. The hooves had edges as sharp as flechettes, and when it snorted, literal steam rolled out of its nostrils. The witch in front of its handler pried the creature’s mouth open and examined the long, slender, vampire-like fangs that were its only teeth. Harry shook his head. Defiances of the Experimental Breeding Ban were alive and well, he saw.  
  
He could never bring Hagrid here. He would want to rescue all the poor abused creatures and bring them home, totally ignoring the fact that most of them would kill him and burn down the Forbidden Forest.  
  
Another witch bent over a cauldron and threw small pieces of glass, triangular and glittering red with a soaking of blood, into the potion. The wizard who had donated them stood next to her, bandages wrapping around his slashed palms. The witch murmured something and held her hand up high, and the smoke rising from the cauldron turned red. Dull images began to move in it. Harry stared, already knowing that he would see nothing in particular there. The visions the Seers willing to work for pay conjured always related to the death of an enemy, and could only be seen by the one who had contributed blood to make that death happen. Still, he wouldn’t be Harry Potter if he didn’t look.  
  
Malfoy’s arm abruptly slammed into his chest. Harry grunted and stopped walking, looking forwards. Had they arrived next to the bonfire?  
  
No. Malfoy was gazing at him with his eyes narrowed and his chin thrust out. If he had been a cat, Harry thought, his ears would have been flattened straight back to his skull.  
  
“You’re here as my bodyguard and to tell me if someone lies to me,” Malfoy whispered. “ _Not_ to interfere.”  
  
 _And that,_ Harry thought, _was only the truth because he was so determined to make it be._ He held up a hand in response and nodded. “Of course I am.”  
  
Malfoy spent some more time staring, then snorted and turned away. They had slowed considerably from his earlier quick pace through the camp, Harry saw, and in fact, a group of brown-cloaked wizards in front of them had stirred and turned towards them as though they were waiting for Malfoy.  
  
All of them wore white, blank masks, like the masks of Death Eaters.  
  
Harry controlled his reaction with a vicious jerk. If they were Lucius Malfoy’s contacts, it made sense that they would dress like what they still wanted to be. That did not mean that he had Malfoy’s license to curse them. Or his own, either.  
  
The nearest wizard, a brute of a figure who could probably crush skulls between his thighs if he wanted to, moved forwards. (Personally, Harry figured he had better things to do with someone whose skull was between his thighs than crush it, but to each his own). For a moment, he stood there glaring into Malfoy’s eyes. Harry could make out oily black hair just visible beneath the edges of his hood, but nothing else of his face.  
  
Then the man grunted and nodded. “Malfoy,” he said.  
  
Harry controlled his start. He knew that voice. Not like he could forget it when he’d spent years hearing it yell vicious instructions to hurt him across a Quidditch pitch.  
  
 _Marcus Flint._  
  
Who had not been a Death Eater. Who was only a few years older than Harry and Malfoy, and had no reason to know where Lucius had gone to ground.  
  
Harry set himself to listen carefully to and remember every word. Malfoy might not be lying, but someone here was.


	4. Tell Me No Lies

  
“We have what you need waiting for you.”  
  
Harry kept his eyes wide open and alert as Malfoy entered the Death Eaters’ little circle, his stride loose and easy, his hands dangling just a short distance from his hips. Yes, Malfoy could relax all he liked around these Dark wizards. _He_ wasn’t the one trying to identify people behind masks, trying to recall where he had heard those other voices, besides Flint’s, before.  
  
And trying to come up with a way of warning Malfoy when someone lied that wouldn’t reveal who he was.  
  
And then Harry remembered that the glamour Malfoy had cast covered his features, and the hair covered his scar. And it was only his voice Malfoy had forbidden him to use. And it was hard to distinguish Auror reflexes from those of a trained duelist once the Auror was out of his robes.  
  
He grinned. He’d come up with a way. Malfoy wouldn’t like it, most probably, but too bad. Next time, he would remember to arrange a signal beforehand.  
  
Harry liked it when he could teach other people to sharpen their memories. He lived to serve.  
  
He strolled casually past the other Death Eaters and looped his arm around Malfoy’s waist. Malfoy stiffened, of course, but not as much as he had when Harry touched his arm for the Side-Along Apparition. _Interesting._  
  
“Your bodyguard seems a bit handsy, Malfoy,” said Flint, and turned as if he thought that Malfoy would need help knocking Harry’s hands away. That made Harry want to shake his head sadly, because anyone who aspired to the position of a wizarding terrorist should be able to see the way Malfoy moved and understand the silent message it sent, but he nobly refrained. Flint would just have to remain unaware of Harry’s sorrow.  
  
“He is that,” Malfoy said, and still no red stained the air around him. Harry eyed him sideways. He was starting to wonder if Malfoy was being honest for more than just his sake, or if he had discovered some way to resist the magic. But if he had, there would be no reason for him to admit some of the things he had, and no reason for him not to offer _that_ as payment to Harry instead of the contact information he’d promised.  
  
 _Unless he had to use Dark magic to resist my curse, and thought that I would disapprove if I knew the true source of his method._  
  
Harry put aside the idea, to remember it but not act on for right now. He would do what he had come to do, instead. He kept his hand on Malfoy’s side, stroking the fabric of the shirt and imagining the warm skin beneath it that he would stroke if the fabric wasn’t in the way. In the meantime, he looked at the Death Eaters and showed no expression. It was safest, when he didn’t know what his glamoured features would look like.  
  
Flint stared at him for a while, then shrugged and apparently decided that it was no business of his who Draco Malfoy decided to fuck. Harry licked his lips as Flint turned away, not able to disguise from himself, at least, the satisfaction that flowed through his body.  
  
 _No, it really isn’t Flint’s business, is it?_  
  
“Lassi has been working all day on this,” Flint said, and reached out to whip the cover from something that had stood on a wrought iron tripod in the middle of their group. Harry’s attention sharpened. He could feel the shiver against his senses that he usually got when Dark magic was active— _active,_ not simply sitting in the center of a trap and waiting for someone to trigger it. It felt as though someone was gently brushing his spine with a set of knives.   
  
The globe on the tripod was huge, easily the span of Harry’s circled arms. At first Harry thought it was made of glass, and then he saw the shimmer that moved—that _paced_ beneath the surface. It was like the shadow of a tiger pacing back and forth in a cage. Shaped like a tiger, even, he thought. And he watched, and saw the silver-grey edges of the shimmer creep towards the surface, making it look like milk stained with blood.  
  
Flint turned around. Even beneath the plain white mask, Harry could tell he was beaming. He thought it would meet with Malfoy’s approval, whatever it was.  
  
But Malfoy stood there, rigidly staring, and Harry knew he doubted it. That made Harry move his wand in a causal gesture, concealed by his sleeve. The spells he could cast without calling attention to the movement of his wand were limited, and the repertoire of spells that he could both do that with and cast nonverbally was even smaller. But he thought a simple Detection Charm wasn’t amiss.  
  
The globe seemed to become even more transparent, like a floating white cloth draped over a pool of water. Beneath it, Harry saw glimpses of crude iron, even cruder wood, joists snapped together that would wobble and probably snap when the globe was removed from its tripod.  
  
He curled his fingers in and tapped them sharply, once, against Malfoy’s side.  
  
Malfoy hissed his breath out. His hand covered Harry’s, for a moment, and then he turned towards Flint, careful in his motion to keep Harry’s arm around his waist. Harry tried his best to look goofy and puzzled instead of viciously pleased.  
  
“A lie,” Malfoy said flatly. “An illusion.”  
  
Flint gaped. Harry flicked his glance around the circle and noted who else stared at them, who stared at Flint, and the wizard who took a step backwards, his wand trembling in his hand when it hadn’t been there a moment before. That would be the “Lassi” who had created the illusion, Harry decided. Flint hadn’t been lying when he’d said that Lassi had worked on it all day. It must have taken that long to create an illusion that would seem solid when touched, as Harry suspected it would, and probably even last long enough for Malfoy to leave the meeting place before he found out he’d been duped.  
  
Flint recovered first, lifting his head and planting his fists on his hips as though he believed that Malfoy would challenge him to no purpose. “It _isn’t_ ,” he said, and tilted his head at the orb. “You wanted something that could find your father. Well, here it is.”  
  
The air around Flint turned scarlet, as though a wound had opened in the sky behind his head. Harry curled his fingers up and tapped again, this time gently, because Flint’s people were watching them more closely now and might notice the signal.  
  
“It isn’t,” Malfoy said, and cast a charm of his own, although Harry noted that most of them didn’t react to the twisted wrist and parted lips the way they should to a spell. So Malfoy was subtle with his magic, too. That didn’t matter to Harry as long as it wasn’t being used against _him_ , but he would remember it if they did clash. The globe became the center of a diminishing blue spiral, and Malfoy smiled as though someone had tried to stuff red pepper up his nose and stared at Flint. “Would it look like that in reaction to the Defensive Charm if it was real?”  
  
Flint stared at him, his hands trembling for a moment. Harry saw the bunching in his muscles before he reached for his wand, saw the _decision_ run down his arms and into his fingers, and nodded. Someone like Flint lived and chose more through his body than through his mind.  
  
Which gave enough time for Harry to uncurl from Malfoy’s side, make his way across the damp mud between himself and Flint, and lay his wand against the idiot’s throat. That caught Flint’s hand out in mid-air, his curses between his teeth, and the eyes of everyone else in the meadow, even the people outside this little Dark wizard gathering.  
  
“I wouldn’t,” Harry said.  
  
He kept his voice low and muffled. Yes, he was disobeying Malfoy’s order, but if he played it right, there was no one that should recognize Harry Potter in his voice, either. Personally, he thought Malfoy was being paranoid about someone doing that. He rarely gave speeches, and the “Stop! Aurors!” that he regularly shouted after fleeing suspects was too brief and generic to have anything distinctive about it.  
  
 _Probably thinks that just because his own voice sounds like melted chocolate, everyone else’s has flavor. He’s never heard some of the boring things Kingsley says._  
  
Flint tried to open his mouth. Harry lifted his wand higher and tapped it against one of Flint’s front teeth, trying to imply, without saying it, that he knew lots and lots of evil tooth-breaking hexes.  
  
“Stand down, Peter.”  
  
 _Bastard,_ Harry thought, as he lowered his wand back to the level of Flint’s pulse. _I bet you looked up the importance that Wormtail had after the war and you’re giving me his name as an alias on purpose._  
  
But Malfoy was clever, and that made up for a lot in Harry’s book. He moved back and glared at Malfoy from underneath his dripping fringe. Malfoy gave him a softened look back, and then moved forwards to flick a finger at Flint himself. Not touching him as he did so, Harry noted. Well, of course. Who would want to?  
  
Then he saw one of the other masked men edging towards Flint, although he stopped moving when Harry stared at him. His eyes darted back and forth under the mask, though, and he stared at Flint with the kind of single-minded devotion that made Harry want a mask himself, to hide his face. _I spoke too soon._  
  
On the other hand, he could look at this horrifying revelation as a good sign. If someone like Flint, with his looks and his cleverness and his lack of magic, could get someone else interested in him, then Harry should be able to do the same, even if he _did_ still have stained hands and a curse on him.  
  
“You made a mistake,” Malfoy said softly. “You told a lie, and got found out.” He paused, then added, “I wonder what Corinna would make of that.”  
  
 _First lie,_ Harry thought, almost relieved as the red crown grew around Malfoy’s head like a corona of thorns. That proved Malfoy could lie, and it meant that he hadn’t discovered some way to baffle the magic.  
  
And more interesting in the case of this particular lie, it meant Malfoy didn’t wonder about what this Corinna would say, because he knew.  
  
Flint shut his eyes. Then he said, “You wouldn’t have any reason to report this to her, Malfoy.” The air behind him wept, blood pouring down, and Harry held his tongue with difficulty. He wasn’t the only one here who would know that Flint was lying, so why did he bother to try? “You know—you know what she would say about your little _quest_ if she knew.”  
  
“I know what she might say,” Malfoy said, so pleasantly that Harry yearned to be alone with him for half an hour or so, and see if he could get him to talk that way again. “That isn’t the same as knowing that she would forbid it. So. If you’re quite finished trying to distract me, then perhaps we could move on? Where is the real globe that you promised me?”  
  
“Lassi,” Flint whispered.  
  
The man nearest him moved again. So that was Lassi, Harry thought—apparently Flint’s lover or at least best friend, and also the one who had participated in the illusion. He edged towards them, his wand still out.  
  
Harry didn’t have to say anything, this time. He just spun towards Lassi like a weathervane and came to rest with his wand pointing straight at the moron’s chest. Lassi froze and whimpered.  
  
“Give me what I came for,” Malfoy said. “Or I swear, Flint, by the Dark Arts, I’ll take you apart. Starting with your windpipe.”  
  
 _And that’s no lie,_ Harry thought, as the corona faded from around Malfoy’s head.  
  
Flint jerked his head back and looked as though he might insult Malfoy. Harry let his wand move, lazily, wandering back and forth from Lassi to Flint. He watched them tense for a moment, and then he watched them come to a different conclusion: that any spell he cast now would more than likely hit both of them, as opposed to one.  
  
Lassi whimpered and folded his arms, ducking his head in an attempt to make himself look smaller. Flint shut his eyes.  
  
“We don’t have what you want, Malfoy,” he said. “The thing you talked about—it’s incredibly complicated. How many resources do you think we _have_ , anyway? Not enough to do this kind of thing and stay out of the clutches of the Ministry.”  
  
Harry smiled and reached out to let his hand brush Malfoy’s side. When Malfoy tilted his head towards him, in the manner of a lord condescending to his servants, Harry held up a single finger.  
  
Malfoy interpreted that the right way, luckily, to mean that the first thing Flint had said was a lie. He nodded and said, “You may not have the globe, but you have the information I need. Where is my father?”  
  
Flint licked his lips and said nothing. Whether he had figured out the connection Harry had to it or not, Harry didn’t know, but he did know that Malfoy could tell when he lied.   
  
There were other methods of discovery than words, though. Flint’s eyes flicked to a third man, slight and unassuming, who stood behind Lassi and towards the outer ring of the small circle the Death Eaters had formed. Harry immediately glided towards him, although he kept his body turned towards Lassi, and the man half-bowed and came up holding his own wand.  
  
Again, it was Auror instincts and training that saved Harry, and not anything he had been bidden or forbidden to do. He angled his wand to the side, and the Shield Charm he raised caught the oddly-aimed curse that would have hit Malfoy in the side of the head. The next one bounced the hex the man had aimed at Harry. The third one reflected the duelist’s Blasting Curse back strongly enough to make him stagger and hold up a hand as though that was a defense.  
  
Harry closed in, hard. That little bow of the head signified a master duelist, the kind who would use the courtly impulses of his training no matter what, and Harry wanted to take him down hard, before he could make things difficult. Taking someone out before they could make things _difficult_ was the basis for at least a dozen lawsuits against the Auror Department every year, but those lawsuits were always dismissed by the Wizengamot. For one thing, he was Harry Potter, and they were Dark wizards.  
  
And for another, it was a little hard to argue that you hadn’t meant to cause trouble and Harry had overreacted when you’d been about to slit the throat of someone lying on an altar or use an Unforgivable.  
  
The duelist put up a short but spirited defense as he fell back, and Harry responded with hexes that splintered his fingers and came near to splintering his wand. The man cried out when he realized that and turned to flee, which meant that Harry’s next spell, a Stunner, caught him exactly in the chest where it was supposed to, and he slumped to the ground.  
  
Silence. At least in Harry’s ears, it was a ringing silence, filled with silent speculation. He turned around and bowed to Malfoy, then stepped away from the downed man. Unless Malfoy said so, they weren’t here to take prisoners.  
  
That meant arguing with the instincts that had saved him so far tonight. But since everyone else in the immediate area was frozen and gaping at him, Harry thought he could take the risk.  
  
Everyone else, except Malfoy. He only stood there, his eyes fastened so intently on Harry that Harry squirmed a little under them. But he kept his head up, and walked smoothly and confidently forwards.   
  
“As you commanded,” he said, a lie of his own to make the others think Malfoy was the dangerous one here, and then fell back to stand at Malfoy’s left shoulder, the way he remembered hired bodyguards had stood in that one mercenary gang of Dark wizards he’d had to infiltrate.  
  
In the silence after that, the only one who dared to speak was Flint, who gulped and said, “If you can find someone like _that_ , why would you need any of the help we can give you towards finding your father, Malfoy?”  
  
And Malfoy smiled.  
  
Harry adored that smile. He wanted to marry that smile, or at least give it lust potions and spend a lot of time enjoying the resulting fireworks. He would give a lot to see that smile again.  
  
That rich, deep, dazzling smile with a darkness behind it as strong as the light that Harry sometimes saw when he looked at his best friends, Ron and Hermione, shining like stars even now, even after all they’d been through together.  
  
“I think the better question to ask,” Malfoy said, like a lover, “is for you to wonder what _else_ I might do to you, if I can find someone like this?”  
  
And after that, Flint and the others couldn’t help falling over their feet to agree.  
  
Harry was grateful for the fact that he could stand by himself and do nothing more than make a subtle cough or turn of the head for Malfoy to see when someone lied. It allowed him more time to dream, and look, and admire.  
  
And to plan.


	5. Chosen Battlefields

  
“We were lucky to get out of there alive after your ridiculous display of heroics.”  
  
Harry kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, as if nothing could be less interesting than Malfoy’s opinions, while beneath the skin his nerves sparked and he felt a coil of tension unwind, speeding towards arousal. He let his wand slip into his hand and resisted the urge to whistle a few notes, if only because that would let Malfoy know he was planning something.  
  
They had reached the grove of trees to which Malfoy had Apparated them in the first place. Harry turned to face them, and raised wards with a flick of a thought. It wasn’t like they hadn’t already attracted attention from the Dark wizards assembled at this particular meeting place. He wanted to make sure this conversation would go unheard.  
  
Because he intended to say anything and _everything_ he wanted to.  
  
First, though, he was going to have a bit of fun. He met Malfoy’s eyes and lowered his own, tapping his mouth and frowning.  
  
“Oh, for fuck’s _sake_ ,” Malfoy said, which made Harry want to grin again, because that was getting him to show _more_ emotion. “You can speak now. You know why I issued that order.”  
  
 _Lie, but he believes it,_ Harry thought, and cocked his head winsomely. “No, I don’t. Of all the recognizable things I have about me, my voice must rank pretty low.”  
  
Malfoy frowned. “What do you mean? You—” And then he cut himself off, and a dull flush crept into his cheeks. He turned his head away and spent a moment studying the wall of trees, the rain falling still from the branches with a steady and monotonous drip, before he continued. “Yes, you’re right. I apologize.”  
  
 _Truth-telling, but not for the right reasons,_ Harry thought, and assumed an expression that he’d seen Dawlish use when the insufferable bore had thought of another reason for prolonging Auror meetings. “As your general on this campaign—”  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“—This campaign to find your father,” Harry continued, his voice growing thicker and more solemn word by word, “I must know all the precautions we need to take and all the enemies we’re going to face. And that includes internal enemies, like the ones you might be battling in your head. I _insist_ on knowing what you were about to say, the reason you banned my voice, Malfoy. The outcome of the entire war might depend upon it.”  
  
Malfoy carried on staring at him for a little while. That was all right, Harry thought, meeting his eyes and trying desperately not to let the merriness show. He could stare all he liked, since it gave Harry more of a chance to figure out what colors clustered around the pupils in his constantly changing eyes.  
  
Malfoy shook his head slowly, at last. “I recognized your voice before I stepped up to your table in the Leaky Cauldron,” he said, all the inflections Harry admired gone, the painfully neutral words as annoying as paper cuts. “I can remember it well, after all these years. I thought there would be other people like me among the Dark wizards here.”  
  
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Harry said immediately, determined to follow up on what advantage those words had given him. “After all, none of them were as intimately involved as you and I were.”  
  
Watching Malfoy stiffen was fun. “I beg your pardon?”  
  
“None of them have plotted my demise in the Slytherin common room, or shrieked for help in my ear as we flew through Fiendfyre,” Harry said, clasping a hand over his heart, and bringing the other one up to join it when Malfoy didn’t instantly curse him and he didn’t think he needed his wand. “None of them have stared into my eyes from a few inches away and still sworn that my face was too swollen for them to know me. None of them have a mother who risked her life for me.”  
  
“Are you teasing or serious?” Malfoy whispered.  
  
It was a pity that questions didn’t really count one way or the other as lies unless they were rhetorical, Harry thought, and therefore he couldn’t know which side Malfoy fell closer to. “Well, serious,” he said. “As you should know. Unless you mean to tell me that lots of Dark wizards _have_ had those experiences. Have you been selling your Pensieve memories on the black market, Malfoy? I get that sometimes. But I’ve never had someone sell memories as intimate as that. You wound me.” He sighed mournfully.  
  
Malfoy took a long, springing stride towards him, and for the first time since Harry had met him again, his face was flushed with color, and his eyes were dark with it, and his hand was trembling as he gripped the wand. Harry grinned at him. This newly-trained Malfoy was good, but he looked better than his best so far when he combined with the old schoolboy Malfoy.  
  
“You listen to me,” Malfoy whispered. “I hired you, and I can dismiss you without giving you what you want if you don’t _obey_ me. I hired you to find my father. No more.”  
  
Harry whooped as redness blushed around Malfoy’s face like sunrise. Malfoy pointed his wand, this time, at the center of Harry’s forehead, where the disguised fringe covered his scar.  
  
“A lie,” Harry said. “A red glow. And it didn’t appear until those last words. So you hired me for more than that.” He leaned nearer and lowered his voice. “Was it to keep you company? Because you can tell me if it was. You can tell me _anything_.”  
  
Malfoy looked as if he would fly into pieces if Harry could find the right place to press. He stepped back and tucked his elbows in against his sides. His face had drained of color again, but the red glow of the lie lingered, lending its own brilliance.  
  
“It was only to find him,” he said, and the lie’s light brightened again.  
  
Harry clucked his tongue, and took a step back. He could feel his mood tilting, fragile as it had been in the hours immediately after the artifact had burst apart and he started realizing the kind of changes this curse would bring to his life. “You _can’t lie_ to me. Do you understand that? You can talk to me about things you think are true, and that makes me see them as truth. So Flint got away with some of his lies, because he believed that he had the right to take money from you for nothing, if he could get away with it. But they didn’t lie about those people they said we should talk to. Lie to me again like this, and I’ll leave, because someone so _stupid_ would probably try to lie about the contact information he promised me, too.”  
  
Malfoy’s body went still again, the way it had when Harry first surprised him. Harry took his wand out again, spinning it in his hand, and shook his head. “You don’t want your legacy to survive as the stupid Malfoy, do you?” he asked. “You have some pretty hard competition, with your father breaking out of Azkaban and thinking that he can stay free forever, but I think you can beat him if you persist in lying to me.”  
  
Silence. Then Malfoy said, “I apologize.”  
  
Harry squinted. Then he went on squinting, and waved a hand up and down in front of his eyes, when he realized there was no lie-glow. “Wow,” he said. “You _do_.”  
  
Malfoy gave him the most fleeting form of smile, and folded his arms. “I like to think that I _can_ learn from my experiences,” he said. “I lied because I was startled, and because I do not wish to tell you the other reason I hired you.”  
  
“Honest now, but stupid,” Harry noted. “How can I protect you or do the bodyguard job you hired me for if I don’t know all your reasons? You might do _anything_ next. Lie to me. Run off with Flint. Kiss me.”  
  
“That seems to be rather a consuming passion with you,” Malfoy murmured back. “Perhaps I should hire someone else not so preoccupied with my arse.” He allowed all of two seconds for Harry to absorb that he had made a joke before he moved on. “And I didn’t hire you for a bodyguard.”  
  
“All right,” Harry said docilely, lowering his head, and thus obscuring the dancing of his eyes from Malfoy. The air around his face was clear, which meant Harry could eliminate that as a reason Malfoy had hired him.  
  
But there _was_ another reason, beyond his ability to detect lies. By questioning now and then, and forcing denials about various reasons out of Malfoy, Harry would find it out eventually.  
  
Really, Malfoy should give up now. He wasn’t going to win this game.  
  
“We should go,” Malfoy said. “Flint and the others will recover from the terror that you caused them soon enough. Their brains don’t have the capacity to hold on to more than one emotion at a time. Indignation will replace the fear.” He paused, then added, “And I haven’t forgotten my original point. You shouldn’t have committed those exaggerated heroics.”  
  
“Exactly,” Harry said. “But I need to know _exactly_ what I should have done. Allow Flint to curse you? Allow the duelist to do so? I want to know my faults so that I can keep from displeasing my employer in the future,” he explained, when Malfoy stared some more at him. “Also displeasing a man I admire.”  
  
“I begin to wish for your ability,” Malfoy murmured. “Not only could I have conducted this investigation on my own recognizance, I could know how much of your preoccupation with my arse is real.”  
  
“Don’t forget the way you move, and the intelligence that you display _most_ of the time,” Harry added.  
  
Malfoy turned around and walked to the far side of the grove, waving his wand as he did so. Harry’s glamour dissolved with a feeling like water rushing up his body, the opposite of the Disillusionment Charm’s sensation, and he blinked and shook his head, then grinned. “And his magical ability,” he called. “It’s the sign of a practiced wizard, to be able to cast a spell without pointing your wand directly at someone.”  
  
Malfoy didn’t go still this time, merely held out his arm. “I recognize the location that Flint gave me,” he said. “I would like to Apparate you there now.”  
  
Harry didn’t point out that he was a wizard of great ability, too, and could memorize the Apparition coordinates of most places no matter how well Malfoy tried to disguise them. This grove of trees might be anonymous, but Harry would find it again, if he needed to. He simply came up beside Malfoy and extended his arm, as meekly as he’d bowed his head to the bastard earlier.  
  
He _did_ flutter his fingers lightly against the muscle as they Apparated. Malfoy couldn’t say that Harry hadn’t warned him.  
  
*  
  
When they appeared in a meaningless grey room with dingy walls and a single door and no furniture, Harry snorted. Well, he still had the information Flint had given Malfoy, that was true, but Malfoy had disguised this Apparition coordinate pretty bloody effectively.  
  
“Is something wrong?”  
  
Malfoy had gone cold and quiet, pulling his arm away from Harry’s the moment the darkness of Apparition ceased and walking towards the far side of the room, the wall near the door. There were no paintings there and no hidden doors that Harry could see—and he was pretty good at looking for hidden passages after that embarrassing incident in Devonshire last year. Which meant he had only done it to get away from Harry.  
  
“Not so much wrong as _interesting_ ,” Harry said, and chuckled under his breath at the darting glance Malfoy gave him. No, not so much darts as spears.  
  
“We are here to learn more about my father,” Malfoy said. “Keep your mind on that rather than flirting.” He paused, looked at Harry consideringly, and added another glamour. Harry didn’t conjure a mirror or try to remove it, although he was sure Malfoy had chosen one that would look embarrassing. He just breathed in instead, enjoying Malfoy’s attention, and had the satisfaction of seeing him open the door as though he was having trouble moving his hand.  
  
He _did_ step up behind Malfoy as they left the room, because Malfoy would have trouble using his wand if his hand was inflexible like that.  
  
They entered a dim, quiet corridor. Harry narrowed his eyes. There was activity happening, he knew, just out of sight. He could hear the buzz that meant an auditory glamour was concealing voices. He could hear footsteps, and perhaps someone was standing right in front of him and he didn’t know it.  
  
A rent appeared in the air ahead of him, revealing bright blue tiles and a glimpse of a witch with blonde hair and a startled face. Harry took a step back, fumbling with his wand, and the tear closed up again. Harry dropped his wand, glancing at Malfoy for an explanation. He didn’t want to ask for one in case this was another place where fans of his who had dreamed about his voice for years lurked.  
  
“Only you,” Malfoy murmured, shaking his head, “would manage to pierce some of the glamours because your magic got agitated enough.” He brushed past Harry, reaching out a hand so that he touched Harry’s forearm. “Come _on_. The glamours disguise us and the wards keep us from bumping into other people. We don’t have to worry about what they’re doing here.”  
  
 _If it’s murder, or kidnapping, or something else vile, I do,_ Harry thought.   
  
But that just made it even more important for him to get a fix on the place and come back later. For now, he concentrated on following Malfoy through the corridors and trying to ignore the sensation that there were other wizards walking beside him, separated by the thickness of a hex.  
  
Malfoy came to a stop before a door that didn’t look any different than any of the others to Harry: thin and grey and with a brass knob in the middle, instead of on the side. He didn’t knock, but cast a spell that created a slapping sound of hands in the air in front of it. Probably wise, if it was warded as strongly as most of the rooms in the building seemed to be, Harry had to admit.  
  
“Enter.”  
  
Harry perked up for a moment, hoping Snape had survived the Shrieking Shack after all. That was exactly his voice, the cold, deep tones and the sharp edges to the word.  
  
But then they stepped inside, and Harry realized that it couldn’t be Snape, because Snape would never consent to disguise himself as a witch this pretty. She had smooth, thick brown hair, and it hung in waves to her shoulders, ending in curls that looked natural. She had just looked up from a book resting on the table in front of where she sat, marking her place with a finger. Her robes were green, and her eyes were blue, unnaturally so, echoed by the sapphire in the ring on her finger. Well, Harry reckoned he could forgive a glamour or two when he was disguised himself.  
  
It was Malfoy who apparently couldn’t. He came to a stop with so much strain in his face that Harry moved around him and aimed his wand at the witch.  
  
She looked at him and blinked a little, then said, “And we haven’t even been introduced. Most of the time, I know the names of those who would kill me. Or at least their motives.”  
  
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Malfoy whispered. “I _know_ the information they gave me was right.” Harry felt a little glow of pride that he tried not to let show on his face, both because there was no need to let the witch know that he was Malfoy’s magic truth-telling machine yet and because it was a silly thing to feel proud about. He could do so much more for Malfoy than he had so far, if the git would only give him a chance. “The names didn’t include _yours,_ Corinna.”  
  
The woman Malfoy had named before, who wouldn’t like what Flint and the other Death Eaters were doing, Harry thought. He didn’t let his wand waver.  
  
Corinna smiled slowly. “It pleased me to be here instead. And I _can_ give you information on your father, Mr. Malfoy. There only remains the matter of the price.”


	6. The Fumbling Hand

  
Studying Corinna, and the way Malfoy stood and shivered in front of her, Harry understood a few things. They weren’t things that he’d necessarily wanted to understand, but they were there, and he comprehended them.  
  
Malfoy had used Corinna’s name as a club to frighten Flint and the others with. Hearing that, Harry had thought they were friends or a sort, or, more likely, allies. But she was in charge of something important, or in possession of some deadly secrets, and her hand rested too casually on her book now, and she smiled at Malfoy in a way that was miles from how someone might greet an ally.  
  
 _He does have a club, though. One he’s forgotten._  
  
“What price?” Harry said, in a loud voice that he deepened and sharpened to turn into a bray, the sort of voice Umbridge used when she was trying to control her classroom. “Malfoy? You never said anything about hiring anything else. Better not cut into _my_ profit, that’s all I’m saying.”  
  
Malfoy turned to him looking as if he wished he had the club Harry was thinking of so he could beat Harry over the head with it, but Corinna looked at him with an expression of quick interest instead. “Your new bodyguard,” she murmured. No red glow, so she at least believed it. “I don’t believe you’ve introduced us.”  
  
Malfoy ducked his head and shivered a little in what looked like distaste. “Lady Corinna,” he murmured. “My bodyguard, Edward Howard.”  
  
A glow was there for Malfoy’s lie, of course, but Harry was more intrigued by the way Corinna cocked her head, listening for echoes in the fake name.  
  
She didn’t find them, it seemed, or not enough to satisfy her, because she folded her hands in front of her again and sighed. “Draco, you should know better than to bring someone along with you who’s not approved by the Dean.”  
  
 _Dean?_ For a moment, Harry almost lifted his head in shock, convinced that he’d heard his old friend’s name, but then he remembered the “The.” As though this was a school, or something. He kept his eyes fixed on Corinna’s face and rapped his wand against his hand to maintain the disguise he’d adopted of a loud, crude mercenary, but he decided that he’d listen more carefully than ever to what came out of her mouth.  
  
“How convenient for me that that’s you,” Malfoy said, his eyes narrowed and his hands tight little balls of stubbornness, curled in front of him.  
  
“How convenient,” Corinna agreed, without agreeing. Harry saw a faint red star around her hair that winked out a moment later, as though his gift couldn’t decide whether she was lying or not. Perhaps Corinna herself found Draco irritating and couldn’t say. “Let’s take a look at you, Edward Howard.”  
  
She stood up and walked towards Harry. Harry stared at her, his gorge rising. He no longer thought she was Snape in disguise, or even necessarily on Flint’s side, as he’d thought at first when Malfoy had started speaking. What she was, was…  
  
 _Dangerous._  
  
The force of the Dark magic around her body struck him like a blow to the head, and he was reeling with it, moving backwards to get away from her before he thought about it. Corinna paused, and her eyes widened slightly. Then she smiled and tapped her sapphire ring.  
  
The gut-wrenching magic calmed down a little, sliding back into her ring and hand and letting Harry see and breathe again. But he had already decided that he needed to catch his breath and launch back into his role again. “You trying to kill me, bitch?” he demanded, aiming his wand at Corinna’s ring.  
  
He heard Malfoy catch his own breath with what sounded like a painful effort, and then Malfoy’s hand was on the back of his neck, forcing him into an ungainly bow. Harry struggled against it and muttered threats and curses as Malfoy said, sounding like he was pleading, “Forgive him, Lady Corinna. He’s new here. He doesn’t know the rules.”  
  
“Another reason for you to let me choose my guests,” Corinna said, circling around to the side and looking at Harry from that direction. She tapped a finger on her lips, then nodded. “You can feel how strong I am. That’s a mark of someone I might let in the door after all. But your manners leave something to be desired. Stand up, Mr. Edward Howard.”  
  
Harry aimed his wand at her again, and only dropped his hand when she stared evenly at him. Yes, even someone as stupid as he was playing would probably get the urge to behave politely in the face of that stare.  
  
“Still not right, to have magic like that,” he muttered.  
  
“You consider yourself a Light wizard, Mr. Howard?” Corinna had paced behind him now. Harry stiffened, but continued to stand still, even as Corinna’s hand replaced Malfoy’s on the back of his neck, rubbing into the skin there, into the muscles, seeking something he didn’t know about. He saw the flare of blue light from over his shoulder as the sapphire in the ring did something, and then—  
  
Then he was floating. He felt the soothing voice of the Imperius Curse murmuring inside his head, telling him to speak the truth. He wouldn’t be hurt. He wanted to do nothing except obey. Do it, and there would be rewards beyond anything he had dreamed. He would have a vault of Galleons to spend as he liked, and the respect of Dark wizards. All he had to do was open his mouth and tell Lady Corinna who he was. As she walked around in front of him again, Harry stared at the dizzying sapphire, with an image of a star floating in the middle of its delicately carved facets, and had the urge to do just that.  
  
 _I can throw off the Imperius Curse,_ he thought a moment later, and pity filled him instead of the peace that Corinna had meant to cast him into. _I’m Harry Bloody Potter, with a truth spell on me as well. She has no idea who she’s dealing with, and she hopefully wouldn’t try to mess with me if she knew._  
  
He lifted his head, looked into Corinna’s eyes, and tried to sound as though he was speaking through numbed lips when he said, “What do you want to know?”  
  
Malfoy started from the corner of his eye. Harry curled his fingers around his wand and turned it slowly back and forth. It was the only casual motion he could think to make, the only approximation of the signal he had used with Malfoy in front of Flint and the others to tell him when they were lying. He hoped that Malfoy would understand it instead of dashing forwards and ruining everything.   
  
He seemed to. He stood still, although a storm filled and darkened his eyes. Harry hid his beam behind his slow, stupid smile. He _knew_ Malfoy was smart.  
  
 _A prize for any wizard smart and strong enough to hold him. I might not be the one, since he knows who I really am and thinks I’m stupid to boot, but someone else should. Why in the world isn’t he married yet? Or at least involved with someone who wants to pound him into the carpet every time he opens that clever mouth?_  
  
“Your real name, please,” Corinna said, sounding apologetic. The star sapphire glimmered on her finger as she turned the ring around. “We’ve had several uninvited guests enter the College in the last year, and they simply have no notion of how to _behave.”_ She smiled, while Harry controlled his snort that she believed that load of bollocks with an effort of heroic proportions. “I’m sure you’re not one of them, Mr. Howard, but I only wanted to make sure.”  
  
“My name,” Harry said, and clasped a hand to his heart, swaying forwards as if Corinna’s sapphire drew him so much he’d collapse, “is not Edward Howard.”  
  
Malfoy stiffened again. Harry let his hand writhe out and then curl in slowly back towards his side. _Wait. I’m smarter than you think I am._  
  
Malfoy seemed to believe that, or perhaps he had to believe that if he wanted to stay sane. He bit his lip, but remained still. Corinna only nodded in response to Harry’s declaration and said, “What a surprise. I want to know what it is.”  
  
Harry kept a straight face with another heroic effort. “My name is Mr. Doom,” he said.  
  
Corinna’s eyes narrowed at once, and Harry caught a glimpse of the deep brown under the sapphire blue that might be her natural color. “What?”  
  
“Henry Doom,” Harry said, wondering if a red glow lit the air around his face now, or would if he looked into a mirror. So far, though, he hadn’t been able to see anything like that. Maybe he could in the facets of the sapphire if he got it away from Corinna. “Henry for a King of England, and Doom for what I’m going to be to you.” And he stepped gently forwards and used a precisely placed Blasting Curse to shatter the band of her ring.  
  
Corinna shrieked and instinctively shot her other hand out, fumbling for the ring as it fell. Harry had already enacted a Summoning Charm, though, and caught the ring before it could hit the ground. He scooped it up and slid it over his finger, mending the shattered halves with a _Reparo_ and glancing at the sapphire in interest. No, so far it didn’t show him anything that hadn’t appeared before, but he would keep his eye on it and see what might show up.  
  
Malfoy stood there in what looked like shock so complete and absolute he couldn’t move. That wasn’t a good thing, because Corinna had her wand drawn and pointed at him. Harry raised a Shield Charm and shook his head at Corinna.  
  
“All ye had to do was tell us where ‘e is,” he said, striving for an accent that sounded like Hagrid’s. “And not man-andle me. And tell us the truth.”  
  
“My curses can go through Shield Charms,” Corinna said, very softly. She appeared unconscious of the way that blood dripped from her finger, which looked sprained and swollen. Her attention was for Harry’s wand, and for the sapphire ring on his hand. Her eyes _had_ turned brown the moment the ring was taken from her, Harry noted. “You should be careful of arousing my wrath, but since you _have_ done it, then I’m going to kill your friend.”  
  
“My hemployer!” Harry said, varying the accent a little. Corinna’s eyes narrowed further, he was glad to see. “My trust!”  
  
He cast as he was speaking, a spell that made iron chains rise from the floor and clamp her feet to the boards. Corinna shrieked and tried to move, but only succeeded in falling over. Harry smiled. That was the weakness of many places like this, that were so glamoured it was hard to tell what was really going on in them. The owners couldn’t add protective spells to them to prevent someone else from altering their physical features because that magic was in itself strong enough to interfere with the glamours.  
  
“Sorry, me darling,” Harry said, and floated Corinna’s wand from her possession to his while she was still engaged in trying to stand up. “Can’t ‘ave you being a _nui-sance._ ” He pronounced the word with relish, and turned and nodded to Malfoy. “Ye said that she had information on your father?”  
  
“Yes,” Malfoy said, staring at Harry with his eyes so wide and face so still that Harry didn’t think he stood a chance of figuring out what he was feeling. Well, that would change in a minute, when Harry provoked another reaction out of him. “But she’ll never tell us now, when she feels herself ill-used.”  
  
“Oh, reckon she will,” Harry said happily. “After all, she don’t tell us and she don’t get the pretty ring back.” He dangled the ring over his wand and murmured half a spell that he thought would shatter the sapphire. Most people _did_ put protective spells on jewelry, but not of the kind that would protect it against Dark curses.   
  
Sure enough, Corinna sat up with one hand raised. “You’re not a Light wizard,” she said, trying to sound calm. “And you have no idea what will happen if you destroy that sapphire.”  
  
“I’ll annoy you,” Harry said gently, dropping the accent again. “And that might be enough.”  
  
Corinna shook her head. “You have _no idea_ what will happen,” she repeated. She glanced at Malfoy. “You would find all doors of your haunts shut against you. You would never be able to come back here again.”  
  
Harry turned to Malfoy, interested to see how he would respond to the threat. It _was_ a serious one, especially after the way he had tried to behave around Flint, even when he knew the bastard intended to cheat him.  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes, then opened them again. “If I have to make a new life, that’s what I’ll do,” he said, and while Corinna stared at him and doubtless thought that he was only putting on a brave face, Harry was the one who could see the air around him shining clear, unstained by any trace of a lie hovering there. “I won’t like it, it’ll be hard, but I have skills that can be turned to legal ends as well.”  
  
“You would not do that for your father,” Corinna whispered. “I asked you once what you would do to help him, and you said that you would not.”  
  
“I would not _serve you_ ,” said Malfoy, with a gentle, brutal smile. “And this is hardly helping him, is it? I want to know where he is, Corinna, and then he’s going back to Azkaban. That’s a promise.” He was watching Corinna with a faint critical air now. Harry wondered why, but kept silent in the hopes that Malfoy would tell him when he was done talking to Corinna. “You look different without the sapphire,” he remarked at last.  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows. He had seen Corinna’s eyes color when they walked into the room, of course, but was it possible that the sapphire did something else? Perhaps made her frightening to people who already knew her? Or to people who couldn’t resist the Imperius Curse and its variants the way he did? He had assumed Malfoy was treating Corinna with extreme caution because she had threatened him in the past, but…  
  
He bounced the sapphire thoughtfully in his palm, and then flicked it at Malfoy. “Catch,” he said helpfully when Malfoy whipped towards him and held his wand up as though he assumed that Harry was attacking him.  
  
Malfoy gave him a dirty look, even as he stooped and gracefully caught the sapphire in the palm of his hand. _Seeker reflexes,_ Harry thought, and distracted himself by thinking about what some of those reflexes would be like in bed.  
  
Malfoy straightened back up (and Harry tried to watch the way his muscles flexed and bent without being obvious about it). He stared at the sapphire and shook his head for a moment. He seemed to be thinking deeply, but just from the state of his face, Harry couldn’t figure out what about. He chose to wait.  
  
Meanwhile, Corinna sat on the floor in silence, her hands closer to Malfoy than to Harry, or the chains around her feet. Her eyes hadn’t left the ring, except to dart bitter glances at Malfoy’s face now and then.  
  
 _The sapphire is magical, I know that,_ Harry thought, watching her. _But I wonder why she invested so much power in something that could be stolen from her?_  
  
“I begin to see why you used enchantments on this ring, and the kind of thing that it was meant to protect you from,” Malfoy murmured. His voice was low and smooth and calm. “I would say that you were paranoid. However, given that I now have the ring and you don’t, your paranoia begins to seem slightly less than your stupidity.”  
  
“Malfoy,” Corinna said. “You know that I have the power to ban you _completely_ from this house as well as the others I own.”  
  
Malfoy shut his eyes and seemed to sway on his feet. Corinna tensed, and so did Harry. He wanted to be _right_ up against Malfoy’s side if Malfoy needed help standing. Right close, where he could feel all those muscles and the way his back bent when he was struggling to keep himself upright.  
  
“No, you don’t,” Malfoy said, and his voice soared and sharpened, then dropped down a little so that he sounded as if he was talking to himself. “You _don’t._ The only reason I ever believed you did was this little gem.” His fingers caressed the sapphire. Harry sighed in silent envy. “And without it, do you still have the power?” He smiled at her. “I think you know what I want, Corinna. The information you have on my father, and a guarantee of safe conduct and safe passage, now and in the future.”  
  
“The sapphire isn’t worth that,” Corinna said, shaking her head.  
  
“Give it here, then,” Harry said excitedly, holding out his hand. “I’ve always wanted to see what kind of spell it would take to shatter one of those things.”  
  
Malfoy raised his eyebrows, but held out the ring. Harry walked towards him, and only when his fingers brushed the band did Corinna finally snap, “ _No!_ ”  
  
Malfoy didn’t repeat his price, which Harry thought wonderfully practical and breath-saving of him as well as wonderful in general. He only waited, and Corinna ducked her head and nodded as though agreeing to her own death sentence.  
  
“Your father,” she whispered, “is in the Ministry.”  
  
 _Shit,_ Harry thought.  
  
From the look on Malfoy’s face, Harry was fairly sure he agreed.


	7. Seek and Ye Shall Find

  
“What the fuck are we going to do?”  
  
Harry looked up with his eyebrows raised. He would have expected to say something like that himself as soon as he finished working through the options and realizing how hopeless they were, but the words had echoed from Malfoy's lips.  
  
“What do you mean?” he asked, as he finished tying the sapphire ring onto the owl they had agreed would return it to Corinna. Well, at least it looked like the sapphire ring they were returning. “We may be able to come up with a way to get your father out of the Ministry yet. Cheer up.”  
  
“Cheer up, he says,” Malfoy muttered, and turned away from Harry, roaming back and forth as though Voldemort had returned from the grave to possess him. No, on second thought, Harry decided, watching him, he looked more agitated than he would have done if that had happened. Maybe as though someone had threatened to cut his hair, then. “When we have no idea why my father is in the Ministry, and no plan to get him out, and no reason to think anyone is going to help us...”  
  
Harry let him rant, all the while fastening the sapphire ring to the owl's foot with extra cords of twine. The owl, a gray bird hired anonymously from a little office Malfoy knew about in Diagon Alley, nuzzled him with its beak and hooted softly. Harry paused, studied it critically, and gave another twist to the twine.  
  
“This goes to the Lady Corinna,” he said, and the owl hooted again and spread its wings, taking off. That had been the bargain, that they would return the sapphire when they were safely out of Corinna's domain.  
  
Harry grinned and touched his pocket.  
  
That had been the bargain.  
  
He felt free to turn and study Malfoy then, watching him as he stalked around and around the little clump of trees that he had Apparated them to, an unknown rendezvous point.  
  
He was magnificent when he was angry, sorry though Harry was to fall into cliché. His hair blew behind him, making him look like some god, some Mercury. His face changed with emotion, from that goddamn neutral mask Harry hated into what looked like porcelain flushed with wine. His hands chopped through the air and showed the speed he would doubtless wield a wand with.  
  
The only problem with watching the way Malfoy moved was that he turned around and caught Harry at it. “What are you doing?” he snapped, hard as falling rocks.  
  
“I was thinking that you looked like Mercury,” Harry answered, since it was true. He was a great proponent of truth in others now, so he might as well do it himself.  
  
“ _You_ know who Mercury is?” Malfoy demanded, staring.  
  
“Ouch,” Harry said mildly.   
  
Malfoy shut his eyes and stood a moment with his chest shuddering, his hands still clenched. “I did not mean that,” he whispered. “I did not mean that you were stupid, or uneducated. I meant that I was—surprised.”  
  
“I’m sure you are,” Harry said, with a faint shrug, and touched his pocket again. He decided that he would bring up the matter of the sapphire when Malfoy was in the sort of mood where he might _listen_ to him. “Now. Let’s consider this logically. Could one of your father’s Ministry contacts be hiding him?”  
  
Malfoy shut his eyes harder. Harry thought he could make out faint traces of pink and red around the edges, and frowned. Malfoy’s eyes looked almost bloodshot. He wasn’t taking care of himself, then. Well, Harry had known that. Someone who was would already have a lover worthy of him by now.  
  
“I don’t know,” Malfoy said at last. “I don’t know his contacts well enough. That was why I needed you, remember.” He turned his head and opened his eyes, bitter blue and grey as condensed ashes.   
  
“I thought you meant that you needed me to tell when they were lying,” Harry said. “But you went straight to people you _knew._ So. Does that mean you don’t know who would do something like this? Assuming they’re helping your father hide, and they broke him out of Azkaban.”  
  
“There’s not many Ministry employees who would be trusted to go into Azkaban and cast any sorts of spells at all,” Malfoy said, and began to pace around the clearing again, as if movement was a solution to their problems. “That narrows the list down, but—maybe it was done another way. Maybe the Azkaban guards were bribed to look the other way. And that doesn’t tell us where to _search_.” He lashed out suddenly, and he must have had his wand in his hand although Harry hadn’t noticed it, because bark leaped into the air from one of the trunks not far away. “Bloody _fuck_!”  
  
Harry stepped up beside him, his wand at the ready and a healing spell under his tongue. But Malfoy turned a deadly glare on him, and Harry paused, raised his hands, then retreated. “All right,” he said mildly. “So. I can think of one class of Ministry employees who would be allowed in and out of the prison, and even allowed to cast spells on the island.”  
  
“Who?” Malfoy ran his fingers through his hair. Not a good look for him, Harry decided, eying the blond spikes that rose into the air from his scalp. There should only be one person with shaggy hair between them, and the spot was already claimed.  
  
“Aurors,” Harry said.  
  
Malfoy turned and stared at him, and Harry honestly didn’t know whether the poisonous contempt filling his eyes was for Harry or for himself, not having thought of that. “What?” Malfoy whispered.  
  
“Aurors regularly replace the guards on the island,” Harry said, with a little shrug and a mild wriggle that just happened to lift his shoulders higher and stretch his robes across them to emphasize their breadth. If Malfoy was overcome by some sudden wild attraction and hurled himself at Harry, Harry wanted to be ready. “Even though they don’t have Dementors there anymore, there’s still a problem with depression. So they have to rotate them in and out. And of course the new Aurors cast spells to keep prisoners restrained and quiet and to get their food to them and give them baths.”  
  
“How?” Malfoy whispered, barely breathing.  
  
Harry suppressed the temptation to ask if Malfoy was going to run through all the interrogatives one by one—although it would have been a good chance to see him start when he realized that Harry _also_ knew the word “interrogatives.” He knew what Malfoy was asking.  
  
He smiled and touched his wand to his chest where the Auror symbol would hang if he was wearing the official scarlet robes, tracing out the symbol that marked him most days of his life. “It seems that you’ve hired an Auror after all.”  
  
*  
  
“Harry! You want to be back on duty?”  
  
There was such eagerness in Kingsley’s eyes, and in his voice, at least, entire truth. Harry widened his eyes and gave Kingsley his best bright-eyed look in return. “Yes,” he whispered. “I thought it would be relaxing, a holiday, to be off for this long, and give the bloody thing a chance to wear off. But…” He let the words hang, and of course Kingsley picked it up. Honestly, it was so easy to manipulate people.  
  
Of course, that was because so many of them believed that he was a straight-and-narrow hero who wouldn’t even know what the word “manipulation” meant. Harry knew he shouldn’t ever become a Dark Lord, because that would lose him the advantage of surprise.  
  
 _A pity._ He suspected he would have made a good one.  
  
“Of course,” Kingsley said, soothingly. Harry couldn’t remember the last time Kingsley had made soothing noises at him. But then, Harry usually handled the pressure of a case by going off somewhere and getting quietly drunk on a bottle of Firewhisky or hurling curses at innocent vases because they shattered with a satisfying noise, so it wasn’t like Kingsley would know. “Of course. With your need for action and excitement, you would want to come back as soon as you could.” He paused, and his eyes shone like a cat’s. “And would you, as long as you’re here, take a look at a suspect we’ve pulled in? He’s refusing Veritaserum and giving us all these riddling answers, and you might be the one who can unriddle him.”  
  
Harry kept smiling even though his jaw hurt. “We’ll see. I want to talk to some of the other Aurors and see what other cases I’ve missed, first.”  
  
Kingsley nodded. “Of course,” he said, and really, three repetitions of a single phrase was more than Harry gave anyone on a good day, so Kingsley had better not say it again. “Then we’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Harry.”  
  
The flames winked out. Harry leaned back and shook his head. _He_ was the one asking to come back early from a holiday, and Kingsley thanked him as though Harry had done him some enormous favor.  
  
“They could all stop fawning soon, and I would like that,” he muttered.  
  
“They won’t.”  
  
Harry jumped and glanced over his shoulder. Strange how easy it was to forget about Malfoy when talking with his boss, although he hadn’t been able to look away from him for hours during the search. But Malfoy had taken up a deliberate posture in the corner of Harry’s room, his arms folded, his back against the bookshelves, as though he _wanted_ to make himself small and forgettable. Harry thought it the wrong one for him, but he was confident Malfoy would find something else he could apply himself to soon, because ambition was his middle name.  
  
Even if Harry didn’t yet know what particular ambition involved recapturing his father and making him suffer the loneliness of a cell in Azkaban. But he would.  
  
“They won’t what?” Harry asked, and yawned, rubbing a hand over his face. It had been a long day, and he had used more magic than he’d realized, in the confrontations with Flint’s duelist and Corinna. Of course, the truth magic seemed to exhaust him a little, sometimes, at least when he was actively using it. “You can have the bed, Malfoy. I’ll take the couch. And a shower, first.” He moved towards the bathroom.  
  
“They’ll never stop fawning on you,” Malfoy whispered, voice low and salty and pointed. “And you’ll never stop doing things that encourage them to, so it’s your own fault.”  
  
Harry stood there looking at the wall for a moment. Then he turned back. Malfoy had risen to his full height, and his “forgettable” pose had fallen off him like a discarded cloak. His hand hovered over his wand.  
  
 _Maybe he’s going to take his frustrations out on me for going after Corinna,_ Harry thought, but the prospect no longer appealed as it would have a few hours ago. He licked his lips anyway, and Malfoy’s eyes came up to follow his tongue. Harry stalked to the side, and Malfoy followed him in the opposite direction, forming the duelists’ circle, his fingers constantly playing along his wand.  
  
Harry knew he could back away from this confrontation and go take his shower. He had followed Malfoy on this investigation and trusted him wildly so far. Trusted him when he said that he had a good reason for hiring someone with Harry’s new curse, trusted him when he said that he would provide the contact information of a specialist in removing the curse, trusted him when he took Harry into places where he would only go to arrest someone on a normal day. He could turn his back, and Malfoy would stand there and not curse him.  
  
But even if his senses were dulled, his muscles aching, his magical core feeling empty, he didn’t want to.  
  
“How do I encourage them?” he whispered, and saw Malfoy pause at how deep his voice had got. Well, good. That _had_ been the effect Harry was going for, or one of them. Unfortunately, he saw no rising beneath Malfoy’s belt when he flicked his gaze down, which meant the other effect hadn’t worked. He would just have to try harder in the future. “I was hardly holding out a hand to Kingsley and telling him to lick it like a good dog.”  
  
“You don’t tell them to back off,” Malfoy said, without missing a blink or a beat. Harry wondered if _he_ could see the effect _his_ voice was having. Harry’s magical core was still hollow, but his mind was clearing, his instincts sharpening. “And you could. With your power and your temper, you could do the same thing that you did to Flint and Corinna, and they’d have to.”  
  
Harry snorted. “You think I go around cursing my friends? That’s only yours.”  
  
Malfoy’s gleaming, bared teeth said the temptation to debate about whether Flint and Corinna were his friends had been met and shredded. “You forced them to respect you,” he said. “Why don’t you do the same thing with people who mean more to you, who impact your life more than a passing fancy of a Dark wizard?”  
  
Harry shook his head. “You have no idea about the way that friends interact with each other on a day-to-day basis.” He paused, watching the flush that poured into Malfoy’s cheeks, and he succumbed to the temptation that he’d felt earlier, watching him pace around that little grove of trees, to make him angry, and thus make him magnificent. “Probably because you never had any _real_ ones.”  
  
Malfoy unfolded from the wall like a Dementor, and billowed forwards rather than stalking. Harry turned broadside to meet him, wand out and the pulse in his throat thrumming an insistent beat.  
  
Malfoy was there, next to him, before he could decide on the course of action he wanted to take, a curse or something else. He pinned Harry to the bookshelf behind him, dangerously near the telly, and whispered, “You _would_ say that. Because you haven’t changed at all, have you? You’re still the same uncaring, joking, boisterous _idiot_ that you always were. Enjoying the attention and not caring about the things you do to disrupt my life, because you think that those bonds and contacts can’t possibly matter to me.”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, watching the clear air around Malfoy’s head. He really had that impression of Harry. Well, Harry thought, he hadn’t done much to discourage it. _Much_. “That’s all I care about. Getting my own way and making you miserable.”  
  
Malfoy narrowed his eyes and stepped back, soft and wary. His gaze never moved from Harry’s face. “You sound as if you don’t believe it.”  
  
Harry laughed, and the laughter cracked and scraped at his ears. He didn’t know whether he was joking or serious now, and he almost thought it didn’t matter. “You think I don’t? I’m the one in my head, and I know what my motivations are. But I’m not surprised at what they look like to you from the outside.” Hurt, perhaps, but not surprised.  
  
Malfoy frowned, and studied him. Then he said, “What in the world could you have to gain from assaulting Corinna?”  
  
“Earning respect for _you_ ,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Why do you think I cared about forcing her to respect me? I’m never going to see her again.” _Maybe._ He didn’t move a hand down to his pocket, because that would reveal too much.  
  
Malfoy fell back a step. Then another. “You couldn’t be. You must know that, despite the deal we made with Corinna, I’ll have to watch my back, and this _will_ disrupt my life and my brewing.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “If you thought the deal would cost you more than it would gain, then you could have not made it. I would have given the ring back to her if you told me to. I just thought I would see what I could win for you.”  
  
“ _Why_?” Malfoy shot the question like an arrow.  
  
“Because,” Harry said patiently, “you idiot, I find you attractive. I probably won’t be around you for very long, but at least I can win this much for you, before I go. It was the same reason I wouldn’t let Flint get away with cheating you, even though he wasn’t technically lying right then about your father. You hired me for that, but I can go beyond the terms of my employment if I choose to, as long as it doesn’t violate orders you gave me.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him, lips parted and eyes alert in a way they hadn’t been before. He had known Harry was attracted to him, accused him of liking to admire his arse, but he hadn’t thought about _this,_ Harry thought. He should have. He’d seen that Harry was active and not passive, why did he think that Harry was going to sit around all the time and not _act_ on that bloody attraction that wouldn’t stop tormenting him?  
  
Malfoy shook his head, and several words tried to bubble out past his lips that didn’t get there. He took a step towards Harry. And another. Harry allowed it because Malfoy didn’t have his wand in hand, and he was curious to see what he would do.  
  
What happened was that Malfoy placed a hand on his right cheek and held it there. Harry waited for the slap. He was still waiting even when Malfoy lifted his other hand into place to hold his left cheek.  
  
And when Malfoy leaned forwards and kissed him.  
  
And then he got over his own attack of unaccustomed passivity and kissed him back.


	8. Teaching Desire

  
Malfoy leaned against and into him as they kissed, and Harry realized that Malfoy was trembling as if he would fall over. Were kisses made out of pure desire so rare in his life?  
  
Then again, Harry’s ability to read the truth didn’t extend to actions like this, or ones where there was a complexity of motives, which was almost certainly the case here. He touched Malfoy gently, therefore, only knowing that for _him_ , it was desire, and skimming his palms down Malfoy’s cheeks and his sides and his arms and murmuring soft, wordless sounds of praise.  
  
As though he lost the ability to advance when Harry started responding, Malfoy froze. Harry grinned as he knelt down in front of Malfoy. He knew exactly _how_ to respond to that problem. He reached in and unbuttoned Malfoy’s robes, then unbuttoned the trousers that he found beneath them. Not all wizards wore so many layers, but it didn't surprise Harry that Malfoy did.  
  
“ _Draco_ ,” he whispered, to see if he could, to see if it was allowed, and Malfoy shuddered above him and reached a shaking hand down.  
  
“It shouldn’t,” he said, without almost no voice behind the words.  
  
Harry reached out and fondled him in silence, up and down, sliding and looping his fingers around Malfoy, who closed his eyes and swayed into him. Harry grinned. _A fine compliment, that I can make him melt even before my mouth is on him._  
  
He knew better than to say that aloud, though. If Malfoy was this nervous and wary when Harry had done nothing but touch him, he wouldn’t appreciate Harry’s sense of humor and would snap himself back behind the shell again.  
  
 _How can anyone not appreciate my sense of humor? That’s something we’ll need to work on._ Harry opened his mouth to engulf the head of Malfoy’s prick instead, swirling his tongue slowly back and forth, and then sucking all at once just when Malfoy looked as if he was going to relax.  
  
Malfoy cried out, and his hips jolted forwards. Harry moved easily with the buck, because he had expected it, and went to serious work, moving his jaw back and forth in gentle patterns that wouldn’t tire him out.   
  
“You _can’t_ ,” Malfoy gasped. Since his hands didn’t come down to push Harry away—they were gripping the sides of the bookshelf Harry had pressed him against instead—Harry reckoned that it was a protest against the universe instead of the specific thing that Harry was doing.  
  
And, well, Harry had given up listening to protests against the universe when he survived the Killing Curse the second time. He reckoned that his survival was the biggest _fuck you_ to the universe that he would ever be able to personally give in his lifetime, and it really didn’t need any more of them.  
  
He leaned in closer, looping his arms around Malfoy’s arse, drawing him in. He liked doing this, sometimes and when he was with someone he liked, and his tongue stroked and his muffled voice murmured, while his mind danced on the way Malfoy had stared at him when he took Corinna’s sapphire, how Malfoy had reacted to his signals at once when Harry told him Flint was lying, the arrogance and the cleverness of Malfoy coming to hire him in the first place without telling him exactly why he wanted Harry.  
  
Malfoy, Malfoy, always _Malfoy_.  
  
His tongue worked and lashed until Malfoy tightened all over, and his jaws clamped shut as though he wouldn’t come if he could just keep his tongue between his lips. Harry pulled back a little to gasp, and then set to work earnestly again, making sure that Malfoy would keep neither orgasm nor sound to himself.  
  
And Malfoy didn’t, unexpectedly generous, though he tilted his head back and voiced the sound as a long, deep groan instead of the squeak that Harry was imagining it might be. Harry pulled back, still licking, and enjoying the unusual taste in his mouth.   
  
Well, unusual because he so rarely did this sort of thing now. Not unusual because Malfoy had some kind of trait that made him taste nice.  
  
 _But I’d be perfectly willing to taste him again,_ Harry thought, as he leaned back on his heels and reached for his own dick, half-closing his eyes in anticipation of how good his hand would feel on it.  
  
Then all motion stopped. Harry looked up, and blinked. Malfoy had moved, although Harry hadn’t heard him and he should have with all his expensive Auror training, kneeling down in front of Harry and catching his wrist. He was still staring at Harry’s mouth, and Harry laughed in spite of himself. “I’m afraid that I can’t give you any more of that until you can get it up again,” he said. “Which I don’t think even _you_ can.” He paused, struck by a sudden thought. He’d never done this to someone who was a Potions master before. “Unless you have a potion for that kind of thing?”  
  
“Potions like that are dangerous, not the jokes you think they are.” But Malfoy didn’t say it as if he was angry, and his eyes had moved from Harry’s mouth to his own eyes.  
  
Harry stared back, and then gave a little protesting tug on his wrist. “Do you mind? You got off. Don’t be selfish.”  
  
“I wasn’t intending to,” Malfoy retorted, and then stripped Harry’s trousers and pants off with a single twist and pull of his fingers that seemed supernatural, until Harry saw the wand in his hand, and grinned. He sprawled back on the floor, tucking his hands behind his head and spreading his legs so Malfoy could enjoy the sight.  
  
He knew better than to _ask_ Malfoy if he enjoyed it, of course. Malfoy was still on the edge of “magnificently angry,” and that kind of question would either piss him off or scare him off—and then make him angry that he had been scared. In this case, Harry’s best tactic would be to let Malfoy’s eyes convince him.  
  
Malfoy stared at Harry, and a sharp sound came out of his throat. Harry would have called it a bark, except it was smaller than that, and hungrier. And as Malfoy’s legs moved apart in return, Harry saw a small stirring between them.  
  
 _I can work miracles._  
  
He laughed, drunk, and then Malfoy was down on him, gripping Harry’s stained hands in his as though he could acquire the truth spell from simple contact and make Harry be quiet that way.  
  
Harry twisted urgently as Malfoy’s hands gripped him and began to pull, shutting his eyes when it got too intense to keep them open. Of course, Malfoy, bastard that he was, immediately stopped. Harry glanced up at him, and found Malfoy rocking back on his heels, one hand creeping between his legs.  
  
“I want your eyes open when I’m fucking you,” Malfoy whispered, and went back to stroking, giving Harry the full benefit of his long fingers and broad palm. Harry moaned, but obediently kept eye contact. It was a long time since he’d been with someone, but even longer since he was with someone who would _bother_ to order him around like this.  
  
He liked it, the way he liked everything about Malfoy right now, from his reluctance to touch himself as he came back to life to the way that his eyes flickered, quicksilver-grey and quicksilver-swift, back and forth from Harry’s face to his groin.  
  
Because it was coming from Malfoy, he liked it.  
  
And that meant he had to groan harder, had to arch up and present himself to the touch of Malfoy’s hand, had to watch him because he said so and because Harry wanted to and liked it, had to touch back, sliding his hand over Malfoy’s and feeling the tendons and the bones flexing, the miracle of his fingers, the smoothness of his nails, the—  
  
Throwing his head back, he satisfied himself in one long rush. It seemed to last longer than usual, but what made it good was holding Malfoy’s gaze the whole time, even with his eyes narrowed and his head straining back to the limit his neck could support.  
  
He was already on the floor, so he didn’t need to collapse when he was done. He grunted and stretched, and finally closed his eyes, because Malfoy had taken his hand off Harry’s dick. His hand was trying to collapse forwards, and he laughed wearily, because it seemed _some_ part of him always had to go limp.   
  
“That may have been a mistake.”  
  
Harry didn’t open his eyes, because he had heard Malfoy move this time and knew exactly how he would be standing: with his arms folded and his back to Harry, staring absently at the far wall. But thoughts would be racing behind his face, not absent at all, thoughts of regret and what would happen now that they had enjoyed each other.  
  
When Harry just didn’t see why anything needed to change at all.  
  
"I'm still your employee, and you're still my employer," Harry said, sitting up and stretching his arms over his head, bending his body to the sides so that he could tilt out all the aches that would otherwise crop up in his muscles. "Nothing's changed. We can go on from here. And meanwhile, I still need a shower, and I don't think showing up at the Ministry before tomorrow would solve anything anyway. It's been a long day." He climbed slowly to his feet, enjoying the luxury of sleekness and slackness in his muscles. He'd had sex plenty of times, but encounters that left him this satisfied were rare.  
  
"How can you just let it _go_?"  
  
Harry paused and blinked at Malfoy. Malfoy stared back at him, back arched so that he looked as posed as a tragic victim about to leap to his death from a building. Harry shook his head slightly.  
  
"You mean what we did for each other?" he clarified. "I'm not letting it go. I'm just saying that it doesn't need to affect the way we're hunting for information about your father."  
  
Predictably, Malfoy snarled and began pacing. "This should never--just because you told me that you found me attractive and I analyzed your self-blaming--"  
  
"It happened," Harry said. "I don't have a Time-Turner and neither do you, since all of them were destroyed at the Ministry in my fifth year. Blame your father for that, if you like, since he was the one who came after me and fought in the battle that caused their destruction. Sit here and chew over what we did for half the night, instead of enjoying it, and make yourself short on sleep so that you'll be vulnerable to your enemies when we go in front of them. You'll definitely make me wish never to repeat that, since you're so boring." He turned and walked towards the door to the bathroom, shaking his head.  
  
Malfoy was utterly silent behind him.  
  
 _That's one way to solve a sexuality crisis,_ Harry thought, and shut the door firmly.  
  
*  
  
Harry leaned nearer the mirror and concentrated on flattening his hair with gentle palms. He wouldn't succeed in making it lie down completely, of course, but what was important was to _appear_ to have made an effort. In the same spirit, he straightened the hang of his scarlet robes around his shoulders and made sure that the folds were neat and crisp.  
  
"Potter."  
  
Malfoy stood in the doorway of his bedroom. Harry tilted his head at him without taking his eyes off the mirror. At last he nodded, satisfied his appearance was as good as he could make it, and turned around. "You had something to say?" he asked.  
  
Malfoy squinted as though Harry had cast a Dazzling Light Charm on himself. Then he said, "You look professional."  
  
"That's the idea, when you have a professional Auror working for you," Harry said dryly, and made to move past Malfoy towards the door.  
  
Malfoy stepped in front of him. Harry looked silently at him, but Malfoy said nothing, instead standing there with his head lowered and his nostrils fluttering like he was a snorting bull. A night on the couch--he'd refused the bed--obviously hadn't done him much good.  
  
Harry nodded. "So this goes one of two ways," he said. "Either you say what's hammering against the inside of your mouth and we both go our own ways, or you challenge me to the duel you're hankering for and lose. Then perhaps we can go on the hunt that you _did_ hire me for without you feeling like you need to prove yourself."  
  
Malfoy shook his head. "You shouldn't have slept with me," he said.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes up, but no, the ceiling of his house hadn't changed. They still stood in an ordinary house, in the ordinary world, and that meant the past hadn't changed, either, despite Malfoy's desire for a Time-Turner.  
  
"As I recall, you were the one who came up and kissed me first," Harry pointed out, with a self-control that he thought was really admirable of him, since it held in the fit of laughter or anger that wanted to break out and carve sharp rents in Malfoy's skin. "Shouldn't you have known better?"  
  
"I didn't know I would regret it then," Malfoy said. "You could have realized I would and stopped me."  
  
Harry blinked at him, and then the laughter came out anyway. He sagged against the wall, careful to tilt his head to the side to avoid the punch that Malfoy tried to give him out of, Harry suspected, sheer frustration. Malfoy's fist hit the wall instead, and made a small shower of plaster drift down. Harry went on giggling, and Malfoy finally settled for folding his arms and glaring at him.  
  
"You _innocent_ ," Harry said, shaking his head. "I don't know what you thought you were doing, or if you sleep with people and then regret it all the time. Maybe it's part of your sexuality. Hermione would remind me that people like stranger things, and that I need to respect everything someone likes."  
  
Malfoy's face was entirely pink by now, verging on red, and Harry liked it. He thought it made Malfoy look more human. It certainly made him look more kissable, though Harry knew he would hate being told that. "What are you _babbling_ about?"  
  
"Merely this," Harry said, standing up and casting a spell that would readjust his robes to the state they had been in before he started giggling at Malfoy's stupidity. "That you knew before you kissed me that I was attracted to you, and also that I did things, like attacking Corinna, which you thought were stupid and dangerous. What made you think I _would_ hold back if you kissed me? You're the adult one, the responsible one, at least according to the way you looked at me. Why should I be regretful with you? Why should I lie? I won't." He bothered to look closely at the air around Malfoy for the first time since he'd blocked the door. "And you don't regret it completely. There's the fading light of a lie there, one of those that shows up when you're uncertain about what you're saying."  
  
Malfoy turned his face away.  
  
Harry moved away from him, towards the front door. He knew how easy it would be to keep walking, go through the door and simply leave Malfoy behind. He would never find Harry, not if Harry didn't want to be found.  
  
And there went any chance that Malfoy would actually pay Harry for the work he had done so far with that contact information. Which might mean also losing the chance that he would ever be rid of his stupid curse.  
  
Harry sighed and leaned for a moment against the front door. It was more than that. Anger Malfoy too much, and he would lose a chance at knowing a man he already admired, a man who was more resilient than Harry had thought, from his reaction to Harry's attack on Corinna yesterday. He could have a skillful lover and someone whom he also liked to please if he bent his stubborn neck a little.  
  
 _There are some things that are impossible, though. If he insists on changing everything and not investigating at my side because we slept together once, what else will he do when danger appears? Is he going to walk away, or interfere when he shouldn't, because he can't trust someone who finds him attractive?  
  
Can he even trust himself?_  
  
Harry shook his head in irritation and turned back. He would apologize to Malfoy for what he had said, not for sleeping with him. He refused to say sorry for things he wasn't sorry for.  
  
Malfoy met him in the middle of the drawing room. He had his head turned aside, as though the blank surface of Harry's telly was fascinating to him, and he spoke in a low, rapid mumble, his hands opening and closing.  
  
"We should go. We'll investigate. I'll bow to your expertise when it comes to Aurors and the names of those who guard Azkaban. You'll bow to my expertise when it comes to my father and confronting him."  
  
 _You think we'll confront him today?_ Harry wasn't so optimistic. But it was more of a peace offering than he had expected, and at least a way to work together. He nodded.  
  
"I'm sorry for what I said," he added, as he turned away. "You're not the coward or the denialist of reality I was picturing, or you couldn't have decided that you would make a new life for yourself after I fucked everything up with Corinna yesterday."  
  
He had to strain his ears to hear Malfoy's quiet words.  
  
"I'm more like that than you think I am."  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows, and kept his hand on his wand as they left. If Malfoy felt that way, Harry might find himself loaded and charged with more work, simply because Malfoy could still hesitate at a crucial moment.  
  
But Malfoy had also told the truth, and for that, and for the sake of Malfoy himself, Harry would labor on at his side.


	9. Immortal

  
"We appreciate that you decided to come back early from your holiday, Harry."  
  
Harry nodded in silence. He was busy watching Kingsley, he realized, as Malfoy, who had been left behind in Harry's office under a Disillusionment Charm, might have watched him if he was here. He was looking for signs of fawning, some indicator that Kingsley would drool on Harry if Harry gave him the chance.  
  
He honestly couldn't see it, no matter how he stared. Kingsley met Harry's eye in a forthright manner and didn't seem excessively upset or grateful or cringing. Harry half-shrugged. He had come here to play a certain role, and if he seemed less like a professional Auror than he should, it would hurt Malfoy's cause, not help it.  
  
"I was bored," he said, which was true for every day except the last one. "And you told me that you had a suspect I needed to look at?" He doubted that it would be a lead-in to Lucius's case, but at least he could get the possibility out of the way right at the beginning, and possibly make Kingsley more open to questions that he wanted to ask about Azkaban guards.  
  
 _You could use your name to get that information. The way Malfoy was all but encouraging you to do._  
  
Just because Malfoy thought things worked that way, though, didn't mean they did. And Harry had no intention of doing something wrong on the basis of mistaken assumptions and thus getting himself in ever more trouble. That kind of thing was for his past self, who had done stupidity at the drop of a wand, and for Voldemort. And for Bellatrix, he supposed, but at least she had served as an object lesson to the rest of the world. No one would ever underestimate Molly Weasley again.  
  
"We have him," Kingsley said, and pushed his chair back from his desk. "If you'd come this way?"  
  
Harry wondered for a moment whether Kingsley would personally escort anyone else to look at a suspect, and then tried to throw the thought off a high building. Now that Malfoy had told him that, he was going to spend _months_ analyzing perfectly innocent interactions to death, wasn't he?  
  
 _I don't have to. I'm only doing it because I think I have to. But I should remember that I've got another job, too, and keep my mind on that just as much._  
  
Kingsley escorted him far deeper into the Auror Department than Harry expected, far enough that he worried that he might not get back to his office in time before someone opened the door, found Malfoy after all, and dropped dead of a heart attack in sheer surprise. Everyone knew that Harry Potter was a Model Auror. He didn't fuck suspects or former Death Eaters.  
  
 _And I'm the paranoid one, assuming that everyone who looks at Malfoy and then at me is going to think we're fucking. They're far more likely to assume that Malfoy is taken. I mean, look at him._  
  
The daydreams those thoughts produced satisfied Harry until they arrived at the holding cell Kingsley had been aiming for. The door was a plain one, more likely to lead to an office at first glance than a cell, and Harry recognized the subtle shimmer of wards that wouldn't activate until someone was close. He nodded his admiration, while his curiosity increased. It was a rare case that could surprise him now. Maybe he had found something that would.  
  
"You said he was giving you riddling answers?" he asked Kingsley, telling himself that his instinctive flinch at the word "Riddle" was really something that would have to be dealt with by a professional Mind-Healer if it didn't stop soon. "What kind of answers?"  
  
Kingsley only shook his head, as though he doubted Harry would understand the magnitude of what he was facing without evidence, and opened the door. The wards snarled out towards him, then relaxed as they recognized the touch of his skin, and the door clicked ajar.  
  
Harry saw the prisoner first. He was sitting at the simple table in the center of the room, looking through the enchanted window in the wall that reflected a tempting vision of singing birds and sunshine. He was a small, slim man, with dark hair and a neatly-trimmed moustache that made Harry blink. Most wizards affected beards or went bare-faced, a fact Harry hated because it meant that his rugged stubble wasn't accepted even when he tried to pass it off as heroic.  
  
Then the man turned towards him, and Harry hissed a little under his breath. The man's eyes had slit pupils. Only certain kinds of Dark magic made someone look like that, and magic that tried to recreate Salazar Slytherin's spells was among them.  
  
Kingsley might have pulled him in more for his understanding of Parseltongue and experience with these kinds of cases than for his truth-telling abilities. That made Harry relax, a little, and he nodded to the man and tried him out in Parseltongue. "Can you understand what I'm saying to you?"  
  
The man stared at him with a blankness that Harry didn't think was feigned. He sighed and turned to Kingsley, ignoring the slight grey tinge to his boss's skin. Most people reacted like that to hearing him speak Parseltongue. "I'll take it from here."  
  
Kingsley left, the door shutting behind him with the same quiet click. It didn't disturb Harry. The wards would let him out again if he asked, and given his Auror instincts, one move by the prisoner would probably result in said prisoner being plastered against the wall with actual plaster between his teeth. Harry was used to being more dangerous than anyone else he met.  
  
He leaned his chair back, therefore, hooking his feet under the table, and nodded companionably to the prisoner. "I've known all sorts of people like you," he said. "People who thought they were heirs to Slytherin's greatness. People who thought they had the right to command snakes. People who thought to equal one of the Founders of Hogwarts with a little research."  
  
The man leaned forwards, hands on his knees. "My name is Alexander Immortal," he whispered.  
  
Harry laughed at him. Immortal jerked back as if stung, and raised his hands in front of him. Harry shook his head and restrained the further chuckles he wanted to give.  
  
"I'm sorry," he said. "I've had bad experiences with people who choose some pretentious name based on qualities they _think_ they have, rather than qualities that they actually have."  
  
"But I've discovered Slytherin's spells for raising the dead," Immortal insisted. "The _real_ ones. The ones that people have ignored over the years because they were scribbled in small and forgotten books, and they thought the books that contained them should look grander."  
  
Harry eyed him. That answer seemed straightforward to him, and no red light of a lie had surrounded Immortal. He wondered if it was simply that Immortal was more willing to talk to a Parselmouth than he was to most Aurors. "Have you?" he asked mildly. "Well, that's different than the people who think they've raised themselves from the dead, I suppose. Though you're pale enough for that to be true."  
  
Immortal shook his head. "You aren't _listening_ to me. Shacklebolt promised to bring someone who would _listen_ to me, and you aren't doing that. Raising the dead, I said. Not necromancy."  
  
Harry blinked. The red light had appeared briefly, then winked out like a comet when he continued speaking. Harry nodded. The second statement he had made was a lie, but he sincerely believed the rest.  
  
"Shacklebolt didn't promise that," he said, and watched Immortal start back from him, his hands once again flying up as if they could protect him. "But that you believe the rest of it--that's interesting. What's the difference between raising the dead and necromancy? Usually people think of necromancy as the art of speaking to the dead and making them live again."  
  
Immortal smiled dreamily. "You asked the right question," he said. "Shacklebolt promised to bring me people who would ask me the right questions."  
  
No light of a lie, this time, but all that meant was Immortal believed it had happened, not that it had. Harry was starting to see what Kingsley had meant by riddling answers. Immortal was insane, and pathetic, and probably didn't deserve as much attention as Harry was giving him. Harry sighed wearily.  
  
 _I would much prefer to be paying attention to Malfoy.  
  
_ The intense bolt of longing that traveled through him when he had that thought stunned him. He had to shake his head and put it aside in order to concentrate on Immortal. "I don't think he did," he said, but let his voice sound a little more uncertain than before. "But you were about to explain to me the difference between raising the dead and necromancy."  
  
Immortal leaned forwards. “I’ll tell you,” he whispered, “if you’ll promise not to tell anyone else.”  
  
Harry nodded earnestly and leaned towards him in turn, even reaching out to clasp Immortal’s hands when it seemed for a moment as if he would hesitate. Immortal licked his lips and closed his eyes, his mind reaching out for a way. Harry waited.  
  
A slight breeze shivered past him, and Harry had the feeling that someone else had entered the room. There were observation wards that gave that feeling, so for the moment, he didn’t glance up or show that he had noticed. He only kept his eyes on Immortal, and felt the man relaxing in front of him, going deeper and deeper, until Harry thought he might be in a trance. He barely breathed, anyway.  
  
“You know that raising the dead can mean making them live again,” Immortal whispered. “But think of the different things it can mean. We speak of the dead living in their children, in their portraits, in their deeds. What is so different about Slytherin’s magic that we want it, when we have ways of continuing our lives if we want to?”  
  
“That’s what I want to know,” Harry said, nodding and continuing to nod when Immortal opened one eye to glare at him.  
  
“You don’t know,” Immortal said, seeming to satisfy himself of this with an examination of Harry’s face, and then he closed his eyes and continued. “What is different is that the survival of the dead, in his magic, is not metaphorical. We can give them a name and a face and a body, again.”  
  
Harry felt his mind arc and come down at a conclusion. Kingsley had scolded him about that, and it was true that Harry had come to some wrong conclusions in his time. But when it felt like this, when his mind moved smoothly and sweetly along the path of another’s thought and touched it like this, he knew he was right.  
  
“You’re talking about bringing someone back in another person’s body,” he said. “Giving the spirit the body to possess, but bringing them back intact with their memories and their lives, so that they can live again.”  
  
Immortal lurched backwards, but Harry had hold of his hands and wouldn’t let them go. Auror instinct told him not to. He had made a connection with the man at the physical and mental level, but he would have to build it back up if he released him now.  
  
“You know I’m right,” Harry whispered, as soft as he could, as dazzling and lulling as he could. “And no one else knew. Am I right? They were all looking in the wrong direction, looking at necromancy and the means of giving the dead person back their original body. You were the only one who looked in the _right_ direction, and showed everyone that you knew what to do, that you were the original researcher and the people who came after you didn’t know what they were doing.”  
  
Immortal bit his lip and opened his eyes. They were very dark. “How did you know that?” he whispered. “No one else has _ever_.”  
  
“I know,” Harry said, and swung their clasped hands back and forth. “But no one else has cared enough to look, either. They heard about your research, and they snorted and said that Slytherin must have meant something else, something grander, and they went on to look for things they said were less paltry. But this is so simple that it’s genius. Of course you can’t just get a ghost to possess a body, because the body’s original owner would win the contest. And you can’t resurrect a body that’s crumbled to dust. But you could give the ghost a new body, if you figured out a way to destroy the owner’s soul.”  
  
“How did you _know_?” breathed Immortal, sounding as though the words came from his magical core.  
  
Harry shook his head at him, smiling gently and not showing his revulsion. One didn’t show it, to someone like Immortal whom he had persuaded to trust him in the first place. “I’ve done my own research,” he said quietly. “And I speak Parseltongue. There are secrets of Slytherin’s that only a Parselmouth could penetrate.”  
  
Which was even truth, just not in a way that connected with what Immortal was talking about. He nodded eagerly anyway and ran his hand down Harry’s arm, making him shiver a little. “Yes, yes, you know. And you understand why I must escape this place as soon as possible. I have managed the ancient spells.”  
  
Harry leaned back a little and raised his voice, to make sure that the wards on the cell would record what he was about to say. “You know how to destroy a soul?”  
  
Immortal nodded again.  
  
 _Well, that’s torn it._ Harry was just as glad that he wouldn’t be involved in the rest of the investigation of this case. All soul-destroying magic that he had investigated so far involved Dementors, and he wanted to stay as far away from them as he possibly could.  
  
He leaned further back, taking his hands away from Immortal’s. “Then I wish you luck,” he said. “Because you’re going to need it, when the full might of the Aurors falls on you.” He stood up and turned for the door.  
  
“But you said—you implied—you would _help_ me,” Immortal said, and his voice was deep and bewildered enough that Harry glanced over his shoulder. Again he thought he saw a flicker of motion, and grimaced. They had probably sent someone in here, Disillusioned, to watch the way he handled Immortal. It wasn’t that Harry _resented_ being used as a model of a Good Auror, not really. He just wished Kingsley would talk to him about it more often, instead of doing it and then praising him as a model. Someday, he would mess up, and it would be in a situation where his mistakes would stand out more than his good actions up to that point had done. That was only inevitable, when you looked at someone with his fame and his lack of political skills.   
  
“I implied it,” Harry said. “I never outright told you, you know. You ought to listen to yourself and your utter insanity. Why would I want to help you destroy souls?”  
  
Immortal sat there, blinking. Harry stepped out of the cell and waited a moment with the door open so that whoever had accompanied him could get out, too. Then he shut the door and sighed, shaking his head.  
  
So he had discovered what Immortal was up to, and now the Aurors who were in charge of the case could look over his research with a more critical eye, if they hadn’t done it so far. That didn’t change the tension thrumming in his shoulders, really. But it might win more tolerance for the questions he wanted to ask, and that meant more tolerance for Malfoy, and _that_ meant he would get to spend more time with Malfoy and do something for him by possibly finding his father. So it worked out to his benefit, in the end.  
  
“Impressive.”  
  
Harry spun, wand pointed at Malfoy’s heart as he removed the Disillusionment Charm on himself. Harry hissed and cast it again, as much as he hated seeing that particular face dissolve into whirling particles and then the shape of the wall. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait in my office.”  
  
“And miss this?” Malfoy swept his hand up and down as though they were still in the cell. “I got to see you interrogate someone, got to see where your skills and limits lie.”  
  
And that was it, really, Harry thought. The Unspeakables had proven that the red of a lie would show even through a Disillusionment Charm, so Malfoy wasn’t lying. Harry still slumped back against the wall behind him and rubbed his face, letting out a groan. “So you don’t trust me to find the information that leads to your father on my own?”  
  
“I wanted to see,” Malfoy said, and let his face appear for a brief moment with a fierce grin on it that Harry didn’t understand. “Because I wanted to know more about you, in the hopes of making a decision of my own.”  
  
He moved past Harry, his hand touching his arm. Harry shivered at the intense contact there, and for the half-second or so that Malfoy’s face remained visible, he looked into Harry’s eyes.  
  
The look there told Harry exactly what decision Malfoy was trying to make.  
  
Grinning, Harry followed him back towards Kingsley’s office, suddenly much more cheerful. _I knew he was too sensible to regret the sex forever._


	10. Searching for a Sign

  
“What did you learn from Immortal?”  
  
Harry took a moment to seat himself in the chair in front of Kingsley, though a large part of his fussiness came from wanting to make sure that there was enough of a distraction for Malfoy to sneak into the Minister’s office unheeded. Of course, Malfoy might have managed it even if Harry hadn’t made noise. He had got through the wards on the cell that sheltered Immortal, after all.  
  
They would have to talk about that later.  
  
For now, Harry leaned forwards and fixed earnest eyes on Kingsley. “I learned that he can’t possibly be working alone.”  
  
Kingsley’s hand jerked, so that he nearly knocked over the inkwell he had been reaching for. He put it down slowly, his eyes fastened to Harry’s face as though he wanted to make him deny what he’d said by sheer willpower. “I was afraid of that,” Kingsley whispered. “What makes you think so?”  
  
Harry sighed and leaned back in the chair, arms folded, radiating a tension he didn’t feel. In a way, lying like this made him uncomfortable. It went against his newfound reverence for the truth.  
  
On the other hand, _Kingsley_ was not the one stuck with seeing red halos around the heads of people who lied. And his reverence for the truth was nothing against his reverence for Malfoy and another chance, possibly, to sleep with him, which depended on doing well in this case and finding Malfoy’s bloody father.  
  
With that resolution in mind, Harry bowed his head. “Because Immortal is dangerous, and a good researcher, but insane,” he murmured. “He couldn’t have come this far on his own…Kingsley, he said that he’d discovered a way to destroy souls, definitively and forever, that didn’t involve Dementors. How could he do so unless he has someone behind him?”  
  
“He didn’t say so?” Kingsley pressed. “Did you ask him? Maybe you should talk to him again and see if he lies?”  
  
Harry held up a cautioning hand. “His insanity is such that some of the things that came across as true to me could have been lies. Remember, my cu—gift can’t give objective information about things that someone believes to be true.” That was true, something proved in the studies with the Unspeakables. Harry didn’t know what Kingsley’s reaction to hearing him call his stupid accident a curse would be, though, so he would keep that little pet name back for right now.   
  
“And that makes it all the more likely that he has a helper,” Kingsley muttered, assuming and reasoning the way Harry had hoped he would. He shook his head, making a soft crushing noise from his hair brushing against the thick leather on the back of the chair. “Very well. We’ll look around some more and inform you when we have someone.”  
  
Harry smiled a little. “There was a thought I had, actually. Has anyone escaped from Azkaban recently? Do any of the guards have news? The only people I know who claimed to be able to destroy someone’s soul are all inmates of Azkaban now.”  
  
Kingsley started and sat up. “We did have an escape. How did you hear about it?”  
  
Harry snorted and pointed a finger at the center of his chest. “I’ve been on holiday for the past several weeks, Kingsley. I wouldn’t have heard about it. That’s why I said it was ‘a thought I had,’ not ‘a mystical revelation.’”  
  
Kingsley laughed, and for the first time, did look like someone who would do whatever Harry told him to with a little prompting, because it was Harry telling him to do it. Harry checked a sigh. That jest had been weak. It was the universe and not himself who produced the most intense comic situations, anyway.  
  
 _Such as that I’m apparently falling for Draco bloody Malfoy._  
  
Harry let the thought pass through him. Ignoring it and trying to argue with it would both make him weaker.  
  
“There has been an escape,” Kingsley said, and seemed to debate for a few minutes before he spoke further. “Lucius Malfoy. But he never seemed to have worked on anything important when he was with You-Know-Who’s band. An unimportant entity, first and last, more of value for his name and money than anything else.” He gave a small smile. “And since the war, both of those things have lost their power.”  
  
Harry stretched out, casually, with one arm, to catch the strike that he assumed would be heading towards the Minister. He felt nothing, though, and Kingsley failed to curl up writhing with the pain of the Cruciatus Curse. In fact, he was blinking at Harry.  
  
“Did you have a cramp in your shoulder, Harry?” he asked.  
  
“Er, no,” Harry said, pulling his arm back and watching the air over Kingsley’s shoulder for a sign that it was wavering and dancing. If Malfoy was moving in that direction under the Disillusionment Charm, to cut Kingsley’s throat for him from behind his head, then Harry ought to be able to see it in time to stop him.  
  
“Or something in your eye?” Kingsley was watching him with his brows arched so high now that Harry thought he would do himself an injury if he tried to maintain the expression for long. “I only ask because you look as if you’re an instant away from winking.” He turned and looked over his shoulder, but to Harry’s relief, there seemed to be only empty office there.  
  
Harry sighed. “I’m stressed, it’s true, and I do wish the Unspeakables had an answer to _this_ already.” He raised his stained hands.  
  
Something bumped his shoulder. Malfoy was apparently standing near his side, and had understood what he feared and was going to reassure him. Harry was glad that he had got rid of his stupid tendency to blush a while ago. That would have revealed to Kingsley that something was up—although he might have taken it for a flush of anger.  
  
 _This is why I don’t enjoy politics. I don’t want to guess at everyone’s motives and the nuances of their actions all the times. There are times that I just want to hit something._  
  
“They would like to run some more tests,” Kingsley said, looking apologetic for bringing it up and at the same time relieved that he didn’t have to wait for Harry to say something in the conversation that would naturally lead there. “If you don’t mind, Harry, you could go to the Department of Mysteries and—”  
  
“No,” Harry said. He said it as firmly and pleasantly as possible, but Kingsley still stared at him. If he fawned over Harry, then, it was at least the sort of fawning that made him question his actions. “I need to know about Lucius Malfoy’s escape, Kingsley. There are _reasons_.”  
  
He lowered his voice on the last word, and Kingsley gasped and leaned towards him. “Is it one of your hunts?” he whispered.  
  
Harry hid a grimace as he nodded. The “hunts” were what Kingsley and other Aurors called the miraculous ability Harry supposedly had for ferreting out criminals from the smallest of clues, which he would start hunting for based on nothing more than a slight feeling of unease or a conviction that the facts didn’t fit with the apparent circumstances. They had exaggerated things until they now thought that Harry’s hunts were the way he solved all his cases. In truth, Harry had only ever had two or three of them.  
  
“Then you can have all the information you need,” Kingsley said warmly, standing up. “I’ll bring in the latest coterie of guards who left Azkaban recently. Most of them were on the island when Malfoy escaped.”  
  
He passed Harry’s chair on the side where Malfoy was standing as he went towards the door. Harry couldn’t see what really happened because of the Disillusionment Charm, of course, but he imagined Malfoy moving aside with the grace of a dancer, because it amused him to do so.  
  
The minute the door shut, Harry saw the air ripple as though Malfoy was about to remove the charm. He shook his head. “Wards,” he said out of the side of his mouth, in a tone that would make someone listening mistake it for a complaining sigh.  
  
Malfoy paused, then said in a voice low enough that Harry didn’t _think_ the wards would pick it up, “I know tricks for getting around those.”  
  
Harry leaned his head back and shook it a little more. What he really wanted to say was that Malfoy might know tricks for getting past the wards that guarded doors, but that wasn’t the same as fooling wards that were meant to detect strangers _inside_ rooms.  
  
Perhaps Malfoy agreed, or was so confused by Harry’s gestures that he had to shut up and think about them for a while. Either way, he didn’t try to remove the charm, and Kingsley came back with a number of Aurors who filled most of the room. Harry was confident Malfoy would still find some place to stand where he wouldn’t bump into them, though. He was graceful like that.  
  
Harry learned little from the Aurors, most of whom he knew at least casually, and who had been chosen for guard duty because of their stolid personalities and their gift for snaring and imprisoning spells rather than their observation skills. One Auror, Gerald Peabody, did volunteer that Lucius Malfoy had seemed more nervous than usual the last week before his escape.  
  
Harry frowned at him. The others all stared at Peabody as if he was making this up, which didn’t reassure Harry much. “And you didn’t notice why?” he asked.  
  
Peabody folded his arms. “Uncommunicative bastard, wasn’t he?” he asked.  
  
 _Like you,_ Harry thought. He could make out the harsh set to Peabody’s jaw that put him in the category of Harry Potter Hater Number Four: someone who was jealous of the immense number of favors he thought Harry received. Harry would like to body-switch with one of those Aurors in the middle of a hard case once, just to see what they would do about being plunged suddenly into the middle of a “favorable” situation, curses flying.  
  
“There must have been something that started it,” Harry said. “A meal he was served? A new Auror coming in that he didn’t know well?” He was proud of himself. His voice was so mild and so perfect, hiding his contempt of Peabody and all the others who were looking back and forth between him and Peabody as if they thought his questions were perfectly reasonable but Harry’s were suspect.   
  
_Yes, someday I’ll become a Dark Lord, and right now, I think Peabody’s is the first head I want to put on a spike._  
  
Peabody blinked a moment, as though the thought was entirely new to him, and snapped his fingers. “There _was_ something. After the post came in one day, he started laughing and couldn’t stop for five hours.” He looked down his nose at Harry, as much to say, _Would_ you _remember how long he laughed?_  
  
Harry returned a look that made Peabody rock back on his heels. Harry hoped that his glance had said he would not only remember it, he would have brought it up the first time someone asked him. Then he said, “Did the prisoners receive any post or packages that the guards hadn’t looked through?”  
  
Peabody snorted like an angry racehorse. “Of course not. Why would you think they did?”  
  
Harry smiled back at him, and held the smile and the gaze until Peabody looked on the point of drawing his wand. Then Harry said, “So he would have read only letters that someone else had already read?”  
  
“Yes.” Peabody stared at him, perplexed.  
  
Harry turned towards Kingsley and bowed a little, spreading his hand out in front of him with a flourish. “Minister, your reason for escape.”  
  
Kingsley gave him a mild scowl. Harry raised his eyebrows back. Kingsley, he knew, hated it when Harry showed up the stupidity of the other Aurors, which Harry thought was an excellent reason not to hire stupid people to be Aurors. “I’ll find someone who remembers the content of the post,” Kingsley said. “Thank you, Harry.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to make a gentle disclaimer, and then paused. There was a faint tugging on his sleeve, a ripple of motion next to him that would have come perilously close to attracting Kingsley’s attention if it was more in the open. Luckily, Peabody and another member of the Unobservers Corps stood between Kingsley and the motion.  
  
For Malfoy to risk touching him in front of others, it must be important. Harry chose to take a risk, and hope it was the right one later. He sighed and shook his head. “If you don’t need me for anything else, Kingsley, I’ll be going,” he said, standing. “This was a nice holiday from boredom, but my telly calls.”  
  
Kingsley stared at hm. “You’re not at all interested in the matter of Lucius Malfoy’s escape?”  
  
“I’m sure you have competent people who can handle it,” Harry said smoothly, and nodded at Peabody, who now regarded him as though thinking that this whole story about Harry having a piece of Voldemort’s soul in him that had been destroyed was pretty suspicious, and why had no one ever investigated it before? “You know me. Easily-solved mysteries aren’t my forte.”  
  
And with a smile and nod at everyone there, he swirled out of the room, in a dramatic fashion that left plenty of space around him in the doorway, and pretended not to hear Kingsley’s forlorn call about whether he would continue handling the Immortal case.  
  
Harry stalked through the corridors of the Ministry with a bent brow, and occasionally muttered things like “Poison!” and “Supernova!” to himself. It kept anyone from approaching him, the way it had all the years he’d used it, and he got out into the open air, with Malfoy brushing him occasionally to say he was still there, without the coterie of followers he might have picked up otherwise.  
  
Then he slowed, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “What was so bloody important that we had to leave?”  
  
Malfoy came out from under the Disillusionment Charm, only to immediately go back under a Dimming Charm, which would make him appear like a ghost or a dream for anyone who didn’t expect to see him there. Harry recognized the heat-shimmer waver in the air above his face, and nodded in approval.  
  
“There was a letter to the Manor a few weeks before my father’s escape,” Malfoy said quietly, his eyes fastened on the distant buildings. Harry thought they should get out of London, but for the moment, Malfoy seemed content to walk slowly and think, so Harry imitated him. “It asked me if I knew how _wonderful_ Lucius was, what a perfect subject.” Malfoy grimaced. “I was thinking of what your Immortal said.”  
  
Harry winced. Yes, now that he thought about it, that explanation for Lucius’s disappearance did sound likelier than it had. “Is there any possibility he would have tried to speak to the Aurors about it if he thought his life was in danger?”  
  
Malfoy shook his head. “The wording was innocuous enough in mine. It was probably even more so in the one that reached him, because whoever wrote it _had_ to have known it would go through inspection. Nothing he could say would have convinced them.”  
  
Harry nodded. “So we’re looking for someone with enough connections to get your father out of Azkaban, rather than him escaping by himself. That does make more sense. Can you think of any reason they would want him in particular, though?”  
  
Malfoy brushed his hand along his left arm, and grimaced.  
  
Harry sighed. Yes, trying to resurrect Voldemort was the worst thing he could think of to happen, so—  
  
Then he narrowed his eyes. “What they want won’t work,” he said. “I wonder if they know that? Or do they know and intend to try anyway? I don’t know anything about soul-destroying magic outside Dementors, really.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him. “Why would bringing back—the Dark Lord not work?” He had to pause before he said the title, but Harry thought he probably wouldn’t half-faint if Harry said the name now.  
  
“Because he tore his soul into eight pieces, if you count the one that remained in his body, trying to become immortal,” Harry replied. “I _know_ the one that was in me is beyond their reach.” That was one of the high points of his life, in a weird way, that session in the King’s Cross Station of his mind with Dumbledore. Decisions he made there were absolutely right, and the shard of Voldemort’s soul was absolutely safe. “We destroyed most of the others when we destroyed the things he was keeping them in. If we hadn’t, there was no way he could have died.”  
  
Malfoy fell back a step. “You mean Horcruxes,” he said. “You’re talking about Horcruxes.”  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Since you already know the word, I won’t deny it, but you could keep from blurting it out to half of wizarding London.”  
  
Malfoy shook his head and lowered his voice, without even a comment about how no one was near enough to overhear them. “That makes him—different than I thought he was.”  
  
Harry thought of asking exactly what Horcruxes meant to Malfoy, but decided there was no need, not with that expression on his face. He nodded. “But it’s possible, I suppose, that someone could try to resurrect the shard of soul that was still in his body when he died. I don’t know exactly how that would happen, or how they would reach it, or whether a ghost with a tattered soul would be able to possess a living body. But that might not matter if they’ve already destroyed your father’s soul.”  
  
“Which they will,” Malfoy whispered, and sighed. “This just became more urgent than I ever dreamed it could.”  
  
“That’s what happens when I take any case,” Harry told him. “For some reason, trouble courts me.”  
  
To his irritation, Malfoy didn’t look jealous.


	11. Inconvenient Requests from Friends

  
“Do you really think _that_ line of inquiry will yield anything?”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and didn’t rub his forehead only because he thought Malfoy was waiting for him to do exactly that. He admired the bloke, he thought he was fit, and he’d tumble Malfoy into bed right now if he was sure Malfoy agreed it was the best time. But as an ordinary conversationalist, he left more than a minor thing to be desired.  
  
“I think it’s the best chance we have of finding out whether the Aurors that said they were on the island at the time your father was actually witnessed what they said they witnessed,” he snapped, and went back to writing his letter.  
  
“They’ve already told you everything they know, the dunderheaded lot of them.” Malfoy slid down against Harry’s bookshelves and stared at the blank telly as though something about its glass was the _real_ recipient of his displeasure. “How do you know that you’ll get any further with this?”  
  
“Because it’s actually the sort of thing George will love, and Ron won’t be far behind him,” Harry said, snapping again in case Malfoy hadn’t got the message his tone of voice implied the first time. He ended with the line _I have complete faith in you,_ which George and Ron would understand as their permission to go wild, and stood up. “I have to find an owl. Do you mind?” Malfoy was blocking the direct route to the door.  
  
Malfoy looked up, blinking. “Of _course_ I mind you bringing your friends into this. Did you assume I was objecting for my health?”  
  
“Everything you do is for your health, obviously, the way you look,” Harry said. He hoped for a blush and a pulling-back—which Malfoy had done several times since they’d come home, as if he regretted that touch he’d given Harry outside Immortal’s interrogation room—and blinked when Malfoy stood up.  
  
“This is unprofessional,” Malfoy said. “And threatening the investigation. I must ask that you stop.”  
  
Harry gaped at him, and then sagged against the wall with a sudden attack of the giggles. It felt bloody good. It felt so good that he ignored the thunderous expression on Malfoy’s face and continued laughing until Malfoy made an attempt to slap him on the side of the head, something Harry wasn’t inclined to tolerate since he became a full Auror and his instructors in the Auror program couldn’t do it anymore.  
  
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he murmured, catching Malfoy’s hand easily and forcing it back. “Seriously, you don’t think this is _already_ unprofessional? Hiring an Auror and asking him to ignore illegal activities?”  
  
“I knew that you weren’t a shining beacon of light when I hired you,” Malfoy hissed, and seemed not to notice the way Harry stiffened a little. “But you talked so much about being a good Auror. I don’t think you flirt with every criminal you bring in. I’m asking you not to flirt with me.”  
  
“You’re not a criminal I’m bringing in,” Harry said absently. “And who told you that I was—what? Corrupt?”  
  
Malfoy moved back from him. “They hardly used that word,” he said.  
  
It was intelligent of him to say nothing else, since it undoubtedly would have made the air around his head glow. Harry found that he admired the intelligence even as he resented the fact that Malfoy knew enough to stop speaking right there. It was infuriating.  
  
“But someone talked about me to you,” he said. “Someone said that I was known for—what? Using Dark curses on investigations?” It was true that he had used some that were on the edge of illegality, but full-on Dark Arts were rare for him, whatever the gossipmongers at the _Prophet_ thought. They were so hard to explain away, and it was so tiresome to undergo the tests that the Ministry insisted on afterwards, to make sure that he had no stain on his soul.  
  
(If that was the tests actually proved, Harry never knew. Mostly they involved the Unspeakables earnestly waving a blue crystalline artifact at him, and given the way he felt about Unspeakables lately, he was more than half-tempted never to let them do it again).   
  
“I don’t think I should repeat what my clients said,” Malfoy murmured.  
  
The air around him flickered, faint scarlet, a statement that could be true sometimes and not others. Harry nodded. “Except when it could bring you some profit, right,” he muttered. “I bet you’d report some of the things you heard to Corinna soon enough, back when you were still afraid of her.”  
  
He paused. The mention of Corinna, and the sapphire he’d kept, made him think of something else.  
  
But he didn’t get far with the thought before Malfoy was stepping aggressively towards him. “You don’t know what I am, who I am, what I value,” he said, and waved his hand between them as though building a wall of air. “That’s only another reason we shouldn’t have begun this.”  
  
Harry leaned towards him in turn, well-pleased to see Malfoy flinch. “You’ve hired me and kept me working for you this long with only the promise of payment,” he said. “I haven’t demanded more. I’ve kept going even when you lied and hauled me into situations where I should have arrested someone, if I was going strictly by Auror ethics. I told you what I wanted, and you were the one who kissed _me_. If anyone’s being unprofessional and trying to hide behind empty words and gestures here, it’s you.”  
  
That caused Malfoy to splutter and step backwards at the same time. At least Harry could get around Malfoy towards the door, and he promptly took the chance, shaking his head about what Malfoy expected from him the while.  
  
Then he stopped, as the idea about Corinna’s sapphire came fully into play.  
  
“You think letting more people know what we’re doing is a good idea?” Malfoy’s voice came from behind him, having descended into an ugly, nasal whine. “You think—what? That your precious _friends_ really _will_ manage to come up with a way to collect all the owls that went to Azkaban that week and read the past impressions the letters they carried made on them?”  
  
“It’s possible,” Harry murmured, his eyes closed. “There are spells the Aurors know that can pick up the emotional impressions impassioned or angry people leave behind on tables and chairs and murder weapons.” But behind his eyes, the idea about Corinna’s sapphire was coming into full flower. It was daring and impossible and mad, but what else had Malfoy hired him for?  
  
“That’s inanimate objects, not living animals,” Malfoy snapped.  
  
Harry opened his eyes and smiled at him. His mind was awash and acolor with the idea now; he had no more need to concentrate on it. “I didn’t know that you knew so much about the theory of that branch of magic. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You know so much about _everything,_ after all.”  
  
Malfoy froze. His hand had risen in an instinctive impulse to preen, Harry knew, and then he had halted the hand because he didn’t want to preen because of a compliment Harry had given to him. Harry snickered, a bit.  
  
Malfoy moved back with an involuntary head toss. “You’ve come up with something else,” he said flatly. “I can see it in your eyes. At least, you must have done, because you can’t think this idea will work.”  
  
In response, Harry tossed the letter to George and Ron into the fire. “We’ll reserve that idea for later,” he said, just to watch Malfoy shake off the words like a dog shaking off water. He _would_ like to see George meet this new Malfoy and see what happened. “But for now, we can do something with this.” He dug into his pocket and produced Corinna’s sapphire, which he’d carried in contact with his body at all times. Leaving it around would almost ensure Malfoy would find it.  
  
Malfoy stared at it, then at him. “You promised to send it back,” he whispered.  
  
“Oh, I sent back a glamoured fake,” Harry said. “It’s clever. I think that most people won’t notice a difference. The reputation she has is what protects her, more than the sapphire. You’re the only one who would probably notice an extreme difference, because it really was only the sapphire that cowed you.”  
  
Again Malfoy made that funny aborted gesture with his hand. Then he shook his head and said, “So what were you thinking of using the sapphire for?”  
  
“I thought we’d make use of it to get into Azkaban and intimidate some of the other guards and prisoners there to show us your father’s cell,” Harry said, watching the interesting colors Malfoy’s face turned. “Then we could _really_ find some results.”  
  
*  
  
“Then you are mad,” Malfoy said. It was his latest argument against the plan—number nine, if one counted all the arguments separately, Harry thought. He had decided to keep count of the separate ones, since it made for more of them than if he kept track of the screaming matches. When he reached ten, he would make Malfoy buy him ice cream. “I’ve hired a mad Auror, and no one you worked with spotted it. Oh, God.”  
  
He sat down on the floor with his hands over his face as if he actually believed it, and Harry laughed in spite of himself. “No, of course you haven’t, you idiot,” he said. “The idea about the sapphire makes perfect sense. Corinna has a buried Imperius Curse in it. It was the sapphire you were responding to, not her. I thought you understood that already.”  
  
“I understand that if we use it, she’ll hear of it and make my life even more difficult,” Malfoy snapped, standing up.   
  
“There was a _we_ earlier in that sentence, and then a _my_ by itself, for reasons I don’t understand,” Harry said. “Do you think I would really abandon you to her wrath when I’m the one who got you into trouble with her in the first place?”  
  
Malfoy stared at him with his jaw dropping slightly. Harry motioned to him, and Malfoy swallowed and shut his jaw. “But you have no reason to remain with me when this job is done and my father caught,” he whispered.  
  
Harry shrugged impatiently. “There are at least two reasons I can think of.” He looked Malfoy up and down, making sure to let his gaze linger at Malfoy’s groin. “Or maybe three, if I really decide to let you go all the way.”  
  
Malfoy put his hands back over his face again. At least he didn’t slide down the bookshelves these days, so Harry accounted it progress. “You’re insane,” he repeated.  
  
“No,” Harry said. “Cleverer than they know, than Corinna realizes, or than you’re comfortable with, yes. I can understand why you think me mad, though,” he had to add gently. “You’re not used to anyone being able to outwit you.”  
  
“You didn’t _outwit me_ ,” Malfoy said, popping his head up again. Harry was glad to know that he could make Malfoy engage with him so easily. That bade fair for his future chances of keeping the man interested. “We haven’t engaged in a contest of wits yet! All you’ve done is trample through my life and cast it into ruins.”  
  
“And warn you that someone was trying to cheat you, and tell you about someone who would have used the Imperius Curse on you, and pointed out that the reason you were afraid of her was a load of bollocks,” Harry said. He tried to be gentle, again, but his voice was becoming more pointed, and so was the look Malfoy was giving him. _Well, fine, then._ “This is the way it _is_ , Malfoy. I’ve helped you, and yes, I’ve changed things, but they were things that would have changed anyway. If you’d bought Flint’s nonsense and tried to use that thing to hunt for your father, you would have gone back to confront him. If you’d had to ask Corinna where your father was without an advantage over her, you would have paid a high price. Things _always_ change. I’m surprised you don’t know that by now.”  
  
Malfoy stood there for a few seconds, breathing in and out, in and out, in a way that Harry recognized from when Hermione was tired of dealing with him. Harry sighed and leaned back against the bookshelves. The only thing he could do with someone who found him so tiring was wait until they had some of their energy back.  
  
Finally Malfoy said, in a low voice that indicated he was keeping it low partially to avoid screaming, “So. What would you advise now?”  
  
Harry bounced the sapphire up and down in his hand. “I told you. With this, we can get onto the island.”  
  
Malfoy shook his head. “One person can get onto the island, and there might be someone there like you who’s resistant to the Imperius Curse. And you can’t fool wards and guard spells. What story are we going to come up with?”  
  
Harry smiled at him. “Don’t you know the way the Ministry handles the wards on Azkaban?” He paused, but Malfoy looked at him blankly, and Harry nodded. “Well, I thought you would. You strike me as someone who would want to face up to all the dangers of a place you thought you might be going someday, instead of someone who avoids them out of the superstitious fear that what you don’t learn about can’t hurt you.”  
  
The only sound in the flat for long minutes was the grinding of Malfoy’s teeth. Then he opened his mouth and said, more sweetly than Harry had heard many birds sing, “Tell me how they handle the wards on the island.”  
  
Harry smiled. He couldn’t help it, he thought. Malfoy was so—so _infinitely pleasing._ He would make a mistake, sometimes, because he was only human, but he always returned to the fray after he did it. Harry could count on him as he could count on few other people at this point, because those people either thought they hadn’t made mistakes or didn’t want to come back to the fight.  
  
“The wards on Azkaban are linked to the Aurors,” he said. “It was thought safest. A prisoner might be able to bribe one Auror to get off the island, but not all of them at once.”  
  
Malfoy’s eyes narrowed. “And you think that someone—what? _Did_ manage that, in order to remove my father? Or had a sapphire like Corinna’s?”  
  
“They wouldn’t need a sapphire. Someone who wouldn’t stop at destroying souls,” Harry pointed out, “is extremely unlikely to balk at using Unforgivables.”  
  
Malfoy shut his eyes. Harry watched him in something like admiration and something like pity; the emotion couldn’t decide which of the two it wanted to be. But then, Harry couldn’t decide whether he felt more admiration or lust for Malfoy, either, so at least that particular emotion was in good company.   
  
Malfoy was _innocent_. In some ways. Obviously not of brewing illegal potions and acquiring illegal ingredients and meeting Dark wizards and trading favors.  
  
But he hadn’t pictured using the Unforgivables. He hadn’t thought to look for an Imperius Curse in Corinna’s sapphire because, most of the time, he wouldn’t have associated with people who would use one. He was in the shallow end of that murky grey pool that Harry knew comprised the wizarding world’s black market, library of secret knowledge, and safety net for Dark Arts practitioners.  
  
 _There are some things he wouldn’t blink at, but he would blanch if I showed him some of the situations_ I’ve _dealt with._  
  
And that meant Harry could feel towards him as someone he could protect. That pleased him to no end.  
  
“So,” Harry said, when he felt Malfoy’s little reorientation to the world around him had gone on long enough. “I don’t know yet how they managed to slip your father off the island, but they managed. And we’re going to use that sapphire to impress and intimidate the first few Aurors we encounter.” He bounced the sapphire up and down in his palm, noting the way Malfoy couldn’t keep his eyes off it. That made it all the more urgent that _he_ be the one carrying the sapphire for this part of the plan, Harry decided. “My reputation will do the rest.”  
  
Malfoy blinked rapidly. “I thought you were going to go in disguised. And that I was.”  
  
Harry closed one eye in a slow wink. “You are. You’re going to go disguised as a notorious murderer that we’ve been trying to catch for a while. I’m Harry Potter, Auror Extraordinaire, who finds legendary criminals just walking down the street.” He spread his hands. “That initial story will win us access. The sapphire will do the rest.”  
  
“They’ll believe that,” Malfoy said, a strange note of satisfaction in his voice. “They _do_ fawn on you, Potter.”  
  
“Or I’ve finally learned to use the power of my name for one of the few things it’s good for,” Harry snapped.  
  
Malfoy watched him through strangely shadowed eyes, and didn’t answer. He looked—he looked like some of the people Harry had talked to when they realized that he wasn’t a complete and total innocent to the ways of manipulation and subterfuge as they had assumed he was.  
  
 _God, don’t start telling me that he wants a hero instead of an Auror,_ Harry thought, as he began to prepare the glamours Malfoy would need. _He isn’t going to want to stay with me at all if that’s the case._  
  
But he cheered up as he remembered Malfoy’s intelligence. If he did have that belief, he would get past it. He was too smart not to.


	12. The Daring of the Mad

  
“My glamour itches.”  
  
“Glamours can’t itch,” Harry murmured, keeping his gaze ahead of him, on the boat that approached them across the grey waves. The Ministry changed the means of access to Azkaban from week to week, or sometimes day to day, to discourage possible escapes: sometimes a boat, sometimes permitted Apparition to a rare number of isolated sites, sometimes a Portkey, occasionally broom. Somehow, the people who had taken Lucius had known the method of access for that week. That only increased Harry’s suspicion to near-certainty that they had help among the Aurors.  
  
“It does anyway.”  
  
Harry twitched the chain that coiled around Malfoy’s hands, and Malfoy jumped a foot in the air. Harry smirked as he stepped down the expanse of trampled mud and sand to meet the boat. The chain resembled ones that the Auror Department had used to use, but gave up when it seemed that too many criminals were dying from them. It supposedly sent shocks to the victim’s heart when he did something his captor didn’t like.  
  
The chain was only a glamour, of course, rather like the black hair that Malfoy now sported, and the huge mole on his chin, and the yellow fingernails that had apparently been cut some time last century. The sullen expression was real, and that was the main thing Harry was counting on to fool the guards.  
  
The other was his own reputation. The sapphire, in his pocket, was going to wait for them actually getting to the island.  
  
The Auror in the front of the boat jumped out with a small nod to Harry and cast spells on Malfoy to check for glamours. He raised an eyebrow at what he found there and turned to Harry for an explanation.  
  
“Hard to lead him here undisturbed otherwise,” Harry murmured back, and flicked his wand sharply down. The mole and the fingernails wavered and dissolved. The hair seemed to, as well, but the color didn’t change, only the absolute and slovenly untidiness of it. There was a secondary glamour there, coiled beneath the surface, anchored in a partial wig that Harry had braided into Malfoy’s real hair with the help of spells and dye. Doing one glamour under another was tricky, but having seen one dispelled, the guards were unlikely to look for another, and doubly unlikely to look for Muggle methods. As Hermione had said once, most wizards lacked logic.  
  
There were other glamours that altered Malfoy’s features and eye color, and made him look like Nathan Thunderwhistle, a wizard who had committed (or was alleged to have committed) seven murders five years ago. The guard stepped back sharply from Harry, and then swallowed. “How did you run into him?” he whispered.  
  
Harry shrugged. “I was buying myself robes in Diagon Alley, and I felt a presence of strange magic behind me. You’ve heard that I can detect magical signatures?” Which was a load of bollocks, of course, but their usual eagerness to believe anything about Harry Potter helped him here. As the guard nodded, eyes wide, Harry closed his left eye in a slow wink. “I felt his behind me. I’ve only felt it once before, but you don’t forget someone like our friend Nathan here.” He smirked at Malfoy, who scowled at him. “And I turned around, dispelled the glamours he was under, and arrested him.”  
  
It had been a dramatic arrest, too, although Harry had deliberately chosen a time when a small crowd of spectators was on the street. Too many people, and he couldn’t have got “Thunderwhistle” out of there as quickly as he had. With the way things stood, those people would scatter and tell more people, but none of the details would quite agree, and the number of eyewitnesses was limited.   
  
Harry had actually thought an owl telling him to bring Malfoy straight to the Ministry might reach him before he Apparated this far, but it hadn’t, and he was going to keep right on hoping that it wouldn’t.  
  
“You’re the best Auror.”  
  
The guard was staring at Harry in a way that brought him quickly out of his daze of self-congratulations. Malfoy sniggered behind him, and Harry twitched the chain, glad that Malfoy remembered to gasp and wheeze and clutch at his chest as if it really had shocked him. “Quiet, you,” Harry snapped over his shoulder, and faced the guard, shaking his head. “Not really. I just recognize what I see and take advantage of it.”  
  
The guard smiled as he gestured them towards the boat. “I’ve heard someone say that luck is more than half of being a good Auror.”  
  
Malfoy didn’t make a sound this time, but nevertheless Harry could feel his smugness beating like a fire from behind him. Harry sniffed and put his head up. “Well, I’ve always had luck, that’s true,” he said, and walked Malfoy down to the boat.  
  
It was a small, grey, rocking thing, and the three other wizards who had come from the island with the first guard, plus Harry and Malfoy, made it ride lower in the water. Harry grimaced to himself, but kept his face on the outside serene. He knew why they had sent so many. They were used to simply taking prisoners, even difficult ones, and removing them to Azkaban themselves, while the arresting Auror Apparated away.  
  
But no one questioned Harry’s desire to see a criminal as dangerous and notorious as Thunderwhistle to the cell himself.  
  
 _I counted on that._  
  
Even knowing that, though, didn’t exactly make Harry feel as he should about this. Malfoy had said that people fawned on him out of misplaced spite, as a point in another argument entirely, but…  
  
Any Auror ought to know that that bit about detecting magical signatures without a spell was a load of bollocks. Current magical theory said it was impossible. People who claimed to have done it in the past were lucky, mad, or responding to something else, subtle enough that they hadn’t noticing it and had decided they’d felt the signature instead.  
  
But because he was Harry Potter, he got away with it.  
  
 _What the fuck else could I get away with? Maybe I ought to become a Dark Lord just to teach them about the peril of having heroes._  
  
He spent the rest of the journey to the isle brooding, and started a little when the boat grated on the stone, and the guard he’d talked to first turned to him and said, “We’re here, Auror Potter. Not half quiet, is he?” He was eyeing Malfoy, one hand on his wand.  
  
“I told him what I would do to him if he rebelled on the way,” Harry said glibly, standing up and tugging on the chain. Malfoy came with him, ducking his head and muttering to himself, which made the other Aurors in the boat nod appreciatively. They’d apparently always known that Thunderwhistle would sound like that if he was actually captured. “Besides, he hates water.”  
  
“That makes sense,” said the guard, nodding wisely.  
  
 _No, it fucking doesn’t,_ Harry thought, as he trudged behind them up the winding path towards the prison. Malfoy trudged, too, kicking pebbles and muttering to give the children someone to glare at. _Does no one have any curiosity? Am I the only one who would want to know more right away? Or at least ask why I didn’t take him to the Ministry so I could tell Kingsley personally that we have him?_  
  
He ought to set up a training program so that all Aurors would learn something more about the curiosity that had saved his life _and_ kicked his arse when he was at Hogwarts, he thought with speechless indignation, following them up the path. What would have become of the world if he and Hermione and Ron hadn’t been curious about the Philosopher’s Stone, or Nicholas Flamel? Or if they hadn’t wanted to know about the Heir of Slytherin instead of sitting back and saying, “I’m sure glad that’s someone else’s problem! Now, what’s for lunch?”  
  
 _No, that’s the reason to become a Dark Lord. To teach people to ask questions._  
  
He had to picture Aunt Petunia’s face if she ever heard him say that, given how many times she had told him not to ask questions during his childhood, and snickered.  
  
“Um, Auror Potter, we’re here now,” one of the younger Aurors said, cringing when Harry looked at him. Perhaps Harry hadn’t kept his Dark Lord thoughts off his face while they climbed as much as he thought. He gave the boy a gracious nod that looked as if it would set him up for life, from the shining expression of hero-worship on his face, and turned to face Azkaban.   
  
He had forgotten the impact of the place, although he had spent some time on guard duty here himself before Kingsley had decided they needed him exclusively on the harder cases. It was like being under the knees of a giant with a thundercloud on his head and a really bad case of gas, if gas smelled of salt and rotting fish.  
  
Harry grimaced as he crossed the final stretch to the prison, and tugged on the chain when Malfoy lagged behind. It made _sense_ that he would lag behind, since Harry could hardly imagine that he would have happy memories of this place whether or not he had visited his father, but right now, anything that made sense would attract attention. The Aurors here had so little of it they probably reacted to its appearance by attacking whoever displayed it.  
  
“We have a secure cell for him,” said the boy who had bounced up to him, puppy-like. The other younger Auror was a woman, and she hovered on Harry’s left side as if hoping that would involve her getting some sort of gift. “You don’t need to worry about _that,_ Auror Potter. We’re never letting him go, ever again.” The woman nodded firmly, her hands sticking out to the side as if she was going to fly.  
  
Harry sighed. He wanted to use the sapphire now, and command these blithering idiots to leave him alone, but he had no idea how many people he could affect at once, and it would probably be more critical to wait for the Aurors inside the gates. So he just smiled and nodded and murmured, and kept on walking up the path as it wound through the crooked boulders and past overhangs, the better to give the impression that the island was really a desert. _Someone_ who’d designed this had had some sense.  
  
The gates were huge and barred, with more guards on alert than usual. Harry muffled his snort. Yes, be alert _after_ an escape, when it did the most good.  
  
“Auror Harry Potter, leading Nathan Thunderwhistle,” Harry said, barely getting it out before the boy walking beside him tried to blurt it. The boy looked a little annoyed. Harry, his hand in the pocket on the sapphire, hoped that annoyance didn’t affect the way someone succumbed to the jewel. Right now, his boat escort seemed determined to accompany him inside.  
  
The guards’ eyes widened, and they scrambled for the sides of the gate, relaxing the wards on the prison at the same time. Harry studied the way the wards went down narrowly, and knew without looking over his shoulder that Malfoy would be studying them, too. They were in tune like that.  
  
 _And other ways, too, no matter what Malfoy wants to think._  
  
Whoever had taken Lucius would have to be clever, and fast, but yes, they could have managed it in the time the wards were down. For long seconds, as Harry paraded Malfoy in his chains through the gap in the gate, there were no wards anywhere on those vast stones. It would take intense coordination, but it might be possible.  
  
 _Which is something the Ministry should change. What’s the point of heightened alertness_ and _leaving the wards the same after an escape?_  
  
But Harry didn’t run the Ministry, and not even the thought of becoming a Dark Lord could make _that_ tempting, so he just had to stand there and pretend he was as flattered by their examination of Malfoy and the chains and their exclamations over his prowess as they wanted him to be.  
  
 _Really_ , he thought as he led Malfoy further into the tunnels, lit only by torches, that bore straight down into the stone, _why do they want someone to admire so badly? It’s different with me and Malfoy, because I found him by chance. I wasn’t just sitting around all the time sighing because I was lonely or because I wanted someone to worship. I looked, and I found him, and now I have someone.  
  
If they’re really _ that _bored and can’t find someone they want to idolize, then they should go out and do admirable things themselves. It can’t be that difficult if I do them._  
  
So Harry thought, and the people around him murmured and exclaimed and waved their hands, and he had to stop at all the little guardrooms buried in Azkaban at each level so more people could join the group and exclaim and murmur and wave their hands. By the time they reached one of the deeper levels—the one where Lucius Malfoy had probably been held, and where Harry knew Sirius had been—they had quite a crowd following them.  
  
Harry sighed. He wished there had been a way of having Malfoy examine the sapphire before they left and tell Harry how many people he thought it could conquer. But then, as Malfoy kept reminding him, his expertise was in Potions and not in all Dark Arts of any kind, so he might not have been able to tell.  
  
 _Time for a change in plans, then._  
  
Harry found himself smiling. Malfoy would probably want to _kill_ him, but this was a surer plan, and it wouldn’t involve breaking the law—not exactly. If someone figured out what was going on, they would be upset, but Harry knew he would be able to pass it off as a prank if he had to.  
  
 _Because I’m Harry Bloody Potter, that’s why._  
  
That didn’t seem like such a bad thing when he could play it off for someone else’s benefit, though. Like Malfoy’s.  
  
Abruptly he bent his head and sniffed, then straightened up, holding his hand out for silence. Nervous giggles sprang up from what sounded like the younger Aurors, but there were hisses to be quiet, too, and Harry knew that the older ones had probably heard about his “hunts” or witnessed them themselves.  
  
“Lucius Malfoy was held near here, wasn’t he?” Harry whispered, creeping along. He caught the glimpses of impressed expressions from the corner of his eye, and wanted to roll his own. It was a reasonable _guess_ , and their reactions gave away the truth. Besides, he would have been able to tell if someone had lied.  
  
“And _this_ was his cell.” Not hard to tell, when someone had put Lucius’s name outside it. Harry conjured _Lumos_ on his wand and leaned in, staring hard.  
  
There was nothing to be seen on a quick first glance. The Aurors would have searched for weapons, of course, or letters, or anything else that would indicate Lucius’s intent. But whoever had sent a letter—if they had—threatening him or promising to free him would have been intelligent enough to remove it, too. Harry was looking at scraped-bare stone, rumpled blankets, and crumbs of food here and there.  
  
Malfoy made a small sound behind him. Someone else made a rough joke about whether Thunderwhistle would be able to expect such good conditions. Harry didn’t pay any attention, stepping slowly inside the cell, tugging Malfoy along behind him with the chain. He was breathing deeply, his mind whirling.  
  
He despised the fetish the other Aurors made of it, but he _was_ good at hunting things down, finding them and following trails that wouldn’t even seem to be trails to most of the others around him, and he could feel something here now. The mood could be broken by the wrong word in the wrong place, by a gesture from behind him.  
  
But it wasn’t. The other Aurors remained rapt, watching him work, and Malfoy was silent.  
  
Harry scraped his hand to the side, against a stone that looked oddly worked. Of course, there were always stories about Azkaban’s prisoners trying to dig through the walls to the sea, but Lucius Malfoy would have been less desperate, Harry thought.  
  
The stone turned slightly to the side. It offered no exit, but there was a tiny alcove in the wall, and in it lay a folded parchment. Harry picked it up and held it in the air.  
  
The Aurors roared, but Harry was watching the way that Malfoy shut his eyes and then opened them, briefly, shivering.  
  
“And now,” Harry whispered, tucking the letter away. “I don’t—” He narrowed his eyes and pretended to look hard at Malfoy, who opened his eyes to stare back. Harry could almost feel him flinching, thinking, _He could betray me now if he liked._  
  
Instead, Harry twitched the wand and removed the glamours that made Malfoy look like Thunderwhistle, Vanishing the black wig at the same time. As the Aurors stared, Harry stalked up to Malfoy, looked in his face, and then spun around, shaking his head and rattling his chain.  
  
“Thunderwhistle tricked us!” he cried, and in the ensuing tumult about that and the way Harry appealed to other Aurors to help him unlock Malfoy from his chains and give him any news they had of Thunderwhistle, no one thought to ask why such a good Auror as Harry would have hauled a glamoured innocent onto Azkaban’s island in the first place.


	13. For the Best

  
“You could have _warned_ me before you did that.”  
  
Harry concealed a smile as he lifted the cup to his lips. They had gone back to his home, after extracting themselves from the startled Aurors on the island with apologies and promises to tell them what the note said as soon as Harry had “deciphered” it. Pretending that it was written in code was unsporting, perhaps, but Harry couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed a pretense so much. “Yes, I could have,” he agreed. “But your reaction wouldn’t have been as natural as it was.”  
  
Malfoy snorted and wrapped his hands around his own cup. He had turned his head away from the tea Harry was making when he saw what kind it was, but then turned it back as soon as the smells had started filling the kitchen. “Was it wise, to reveal me that way, or any kind of way at all? They’re going to think that there’s something suspicious about me now, that I’m somehow connected to the investigation.”  
  
Harry shook his head and took a biscuit from the pile in the center of the table on a small, elegant plate. Unlike the tea, Malfoy had shown no sign of yielding where his biscuits were concerned, yet. But Harry lived in hope. “They’re going to think that anyway. They probably haven’t come to interview you already because they didn’t want you to know about Lucius’s escape if you didn’t. Now they’ll think that someone’s trying to get you imprisoned, and they’re more likely to treat you as innocent.”  
  
Malfoy gave him a stare so dead that Harry grew concerned and waved his hand up and down in front of the git’s eyes. Malfoy blinked and looked away. “Should I be concerned that you’re so good at reading the minds of people you hate?” he asked.  
  
“You mean the Ministry?” Harry stared at him. “I don’t hate them. I _destroy_ people I hate, like Voldemort. I just despise the Ministry and the credulous idiots that don’t see what’s right in front of them.”  
  
Malfoy rubbed his eyes, hard. “You would destroy them,” he said.  
  
“If I felt they had done something that made me hate them, yes,” Harry said. He saw the way Malfoy looked at him this time, and smiled and patted his hand. “But you don’t need to worry about that. I _like_ you.”  
  
Malfoy just went on staring. Harry leaned back and kicked his legs out in front of him. “Everyone thinks I’m dangerous,” he complained. “When they’re not staring at me in awe and studying my every move so that they can learn how to be _real_ Aurors, I mean. They tell me that they love me, they tell me that they admire me, and then they think that I’d become another Dark Lord, just like _that_.” He snapped his fingers.  
  
“Sometimes I think you might be capable of it,” Malfoy whispered.  
  
Harry sighed and shook his head. “You don’t _understand_ , do you? I would only become a Dark Lord if I had an excellent reason, just like I would only destroy someone or something with an excellent reason.”  
  
“But your excellent reasons might not be the same as other people’s.” Malfoy’s hands were getting tighter and tighter around his teacup.   
  
“That’s true,” Harry said, and thought about it, and ended up stretching his limbs over his head to get rid of some of the kinks in his back that bending over in the cell in Azkaban had brought into it. “But they never think the same thing as me anyway, no matter what happens, so I might as well have my fun.” He smiled at Malfoy. “Now, don’t you want to find out what that parchment from your father’s cell says?”  
  
*  
  
When they first unfolded it, Harry thought his lie to the Aurors might have been a truth, after all, and that it was a code. But then he made out the shapes of recognizable letters, and smiled in relief. Whoever had written it only had bad handwriting. Harry had seen worse on Auror reports.  
  
Malfoy squinted at it. “What does it say?”  
  
Stifling his tendency to crow about his superior ability to read bad handwriting, Harry bent gravely over the letter. He didn’t _really_ think that being able to read it right away was such an important skill. He just liked it that Malfoy was dependent on him for something sometimes, so the chances that he would dash out of Harry’s life the second he could were lessened.  
  
“It’s addressed to ‘my dear,’” Harry said. “And it says, _As we discussed, I will come for you after the full of the moon. You may make what preparations you deem necessary. You will need to take very little with you. Every comfort will have been provided for, and your needs anticipated in advance._ ”  
  
Malfoy shuddered and closed his eyes. Harry reached out and grasped his shoulder. Sometimes, caught up in his own giddy delight at being around him, it was easy to forget that Malfoy’s father was the man who had been given this whether he wanted to have it or not, and that his soul might already have been devoured.  
  
“That’s all it says,” Harry finished quietly.  
  
Malfoy opened his eyes. “I know spells that can trace handwriting,” he said. “But it destroys the original. Are you amenable to having this destroyed, knowing you might never be able to produce it again?”  
  
Harry blinked at him. “Why not create a copy and work from the copy instead? Or won’t the charm work from anything that isn’t original?”  
  
Malfoy stared at him a moment, then lowered his eyes. “I never thought of working with a copy,” he said. “The original, most of the time, was one of those documents that I was glad to destroy, and which I was never going to forget, anyway.”  
  
Harry nodded his understanding, and laid his hand on Malfoy’s arm for a moment. “It’s up to you. I don’t intend to have to produce anything. If it would work better with the original, we can do that, but let’s try the copy first.”  
  
Malfoy nodded, subdued, and Harry punched him lightly on the shoulder before casting the charm that would make the copy. He liked Malfoy better when he was looking down his nose at Harry for ruining his criminal life than when he was moping.  
  
 _He’s meant to be proud, to be free. I wouldn’t want to destroy that simply because I might want to prove myself right._  
  
The copy appeared on schedule, on the parchment that Harry had designated for it, and he set it aside and waited for Malfoy to perform his magic. It would be almost the first spell he had cast except the glamours on Harry and whatever had let him bypass the wards into Immortal’s interrogation room.  
  
Speaking of which…  
  
“How _did_ you get into the room where I was interrogating Immortal?” he asked.  
  
Malfoy glanced at him. “This is a very delicate spell, and you shouldn’t interrupt it,” he said.  
  
No red glow of a lie, so it was no use challenging what he said, even though Harry _knew_ that meant he was among the one percent of people who had learned to dodge his curse by using one truth to mask another. He leaned back and studied Malfoy thoughtfully as he chanted the spell in a low voice, gesturing hard with his wand to make sparks leap out and cascade down on the copy.  
  
He was powerful, sophisticated, skilled, and known, if the reactions from Flint and his cronies, and the fact that he had a standing invitation to Corinna’s creepy house, were any indication. Harry wondered why he hadn’t done something more with it. He had said that he could give up the illegal side of his trade and continue practicing the legitimate business of Potions without regret. What had made him get into the illegal one in the first place? More money?  
  
 _I don’t want to think that he would do anything as vulgar as lust after money._  
  
Harry considered the phrasing of that for a moment, and then changed it in his head. No, what he didn’t want to think was that Malfoy would do anything for _paltry_ amounts of money. If he committed crimes for fortunes and treasures, that was another thing, a sin Harry was quite prepared to forgive.  
  
“Anyone would find this spell hard to use when you’re staring at them that way,” Malfoy said over his shoulder. “It’s off-putting.”  
  
Harry stepped back at once, and fixed his eyes on the bookshelves.  
  
“And that’s not much better,” Malfoy complained in an undertone. “You’re concentrating so intensely that I can still feel the stare.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes and turned his back, walking across the room to pick up a book that he had started several times, and abandoned in a fit of frustration each time he reached the scene where the hero killed someone and told himself he was justified because of his tormented past. Harry couldn’t figure out if the author agreed or disagreed with the hero.  
  
He tried again to find out, not listening to Malfoy’s quiet chanting, insofar as that was possible when they _were_ in the same room together.  
  
No, he still couldn’t find out. The author condemned the man in a few sweeping omniscient paragraphs, and then let him speak, and he excused himself again. And that was the end of the chapter. Harry rolled his eyes and put the book back on the shelf. At least do something evil for a good reason, and be able to admit the reason to yourself. He had no patience with people who argued back and forth in their heads, which it sounded like the author was doing.  
  
“It’s done.”  
  
Harry blinked and turned around. He supposed he’d been successful at ignoring the chanting after all, since he hadn’t noticed when it stopped. “Really?” He strolled towards Malfoy, and ignored the eyes which turned on him. They looked smoke-stung, which was interesting, but not particularly relevant right now.  
  
“Yes, Potter, really,” Malfoy said, and pointed to the small pile of ashes that had been the copy of the letter. Harry cast a spell that whirled them up and put them in a small wooden box on the top bookshelf that he had never found anything to put in. Malfoy just looked at him, then closed his eyes and shook his head. “The handwriting—it doesn’t make sense. But there’s the answer, if you want to look at it.”  
  
Harry looked around, wondering where. He had assumed Malfoy would have to have yet a third piece of parchment to put the answer on, but there was none—  
  
Oh. Of course. He had made it appear on the same parchment as the original, like a signature. Harry picked it up and smiled at Malfoy. “Waste not, want not.”  
  
“You are the strangest person I’ve ever known, Potter,” Malfoy said, sounding almost resigned to the fact. “Except perhaps the person who wrote that letter.” He turned away with another shake of his head.  
  
Harry looked at the signature, the name that Malfoy’s spell had discovered and pinned to the handwriting of the letter.  
  
 _Kingsley Shacklebolt._  
  
*  
  
“Are you done brooding yet?”  
  
Harry turned around. It was true that he had spent quite some time staring at the wall and muttering curses to try and make Malfoy’s spell come out a different way, but that wasn’t the same as brooding, and he thought Malfoy should know it.  
  
The sight of Malfoy’s face stopped him, though. His eyes still looked as though he’d been exposed to smoke, and his hands shook more than a little on the cup of hot tea he was drinking. Harry nodded his thanks for the spell and his apology for being snappish, and then he said, “I just can’t believe it was Kingsley. I would have known if he was lying about Immortal, and we assumed that whoever took your father was working with Immortal.”  
  
“Well, perhaps they weren’t,” Malfoy said, folding his arms as if he was cold. “Or perhaps Shacklebolt took my father from the prison for a different reason and then he escaped, and _then_ ran into the people who wanted to use his body to resurrect the Dark Lord.”  
  
Harry made a soft, unhappy sound, and shook his head. “That doesn’t make much sense, either,” he said, and ignored the way Malfoy flinched from his words. It _didn’t_ make sense, and Malfoy would simply have to learn that he wasn’t above criticism, if he had thought he was. “It just—we assumed that the whole risky operation was to get your father out of prison so his soul could be eaten and his body used, and Peabody saying he acted strange would have been because of the letter he got. But then _this_. If Kingsley wrote this, he either has to be involved with Immortal’s people and somehow managing to lie to me, or this letter has nothing to do with the reason your father vanished.”  
  
“Which would mean we’re back to the beginning, with no evidence at all accumulated.”  
  
Malfoy looked so tense and miserable that Harry couldn’t help himself. He leaned in and put his arms gently around Malfoy. Malfoy started and glared at him, and Harry smiled in spite of himself.  
  
“Listen,” he said. “No, I mean it.” Malfoy had made a motion as if to shrug him off, but he paused and turned his head reluctantly towards Harry. “There’s one way that we could find out. I could take this letter in to Kingsley, confront him with it, and—”  
  
“Do that,” Malfoy said, with a snarl in the back of his voice, “and I think we have _no_ chance to continue our investigation. Can even you come up with a lie that Shacklebolt can’t see through? I don’t think so. He has power in the Ministry, and your accident only gives you the power to see lies, not tell what the truth is if someone doesn’t say it.”  
  
Harry paused, then sighed. Perhaps he _had_ become overconfident with the success of his plans in seducing Malfoy and getting into Azkaban and all the rest of it lately. “Right. You’re right. So we have to come up with something else.”  
  
He turned back to the parchment, contemplating it. He supposed that by itself it didn’t look particularly sinister, which was probably why the planners ( _Kingsley_ ) had written it that way. If someone else found it, they wouldn’t think that Lucius had any reason to be nervous, and they wouldn’t step up their guard on him.  
  
He read it again, while Malfoy paced and muttered and shook his arms and glared at nothing beside him. _My dear, As we discussed, I will come for you after the full of the moon. You may make what preparations you deem necessary. You will need to take very little with you. Every comfort will have been provided for, and your needs anticipated in advance._  
  
“That _doesn’t_ sound like a threatening letter,” Harry said aloud.  
  
“What do you mean?” Malfoy turned to him with a frown. Harry suspected that he had been contemplating what the Minister, who had the most power in the Ministry, could potentially do to his father, and scaring himself out of his head with it.  
  
“It doesn’t sound like something that someone would write who was planning to destroy your father’s soul and didn’t care if he knew it.” Harry leaned back to view it from a distance, ignoring the disgusted look Malfoy tossed him. No, it wouldn’t look literally different from that angle, but doing this had shaken thoughts loose for him before. “It sounds like someone who’s anxious that Lucius should look at him favorably. _Every comfort will have been provided for._ As though he’s inviting your father to stay as a guest in his home for a little while.”  
  
Malfoy laughed bitterly. “Who knows what other letters he sent him, what other things he said to make him think that he needed to be on his guard? And someone who hates Death Eaters is capable of letters like that.” He shuddered, and Harry wondered what sorts of things he had seen in the past.  
  
He would have liked to find the people who had sent Malfoy threatening letters and blow them to pieces.  
  
But since _that_ wasn’t on the agenda, he said instead, “I don’t doubt they are. But why would Kingsley write it like this? Why write it at all? Why choose the gentle tone? I don’t understand. Can the charm that you cast be fooled?”  
  
Malfoy smiled from one side of his mouth. “Only if someone is aware of the person who would cast it. The countercharm has to be tailored to any individual who might cast the spell. I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that your Shacklebolt might guess that I’m involved in the investigation on behalf of my father.”  
  
Harry nodded. “Fine. Then I’ll cast the same copying charm and you teach me the spell, and we’ll see if it comes out with a different result.”  
  
Malfoy looked at him, and there was something awful and moving in his face, something deep and vulnerable. Harry hated to see it, and was honored to see it. He reached out and punched Malfoy on the shoulder, to give him a chance to recover his scowl.  
  
“Come on. _I’m_ curious, now, and I can’t wait to see what turns up if we do this.”  
  
Malfoy’s mouth twisted, and he began to teach Harry the spell with unnecessary emphasis. But Harry watched his mouth, and his eyes, and his hair, and enjoyed the lesson anyway.


	14. Figuring Out the Traces

  
_Kingsley Shacklebolt._  
  
Harry leaned back and stared at the words on the paper, the ones that had appeared when he used Malfoy’s charm himself. Then he shook his head. Sometimes he thought the universe was difficult just to fuck with him, its favorite toy.  
  
“Are you satisfied now that your beloved leader had something to do with this?”  
  
Harry blinked and looked up. “I wouldn’t say that satisfaction is my major emotion,” he said mildly. “And neither is he my beloved leader. If he’s involved in this, then I’m almost happy to have confirmation, so I can avoid trusting him with too much. But I still need to figure out if he managed to lie to me. If he did, then a lot of things need to change.”  
  
“Yes. Such as my hiring of you.”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. He doubted that Malfoy would really let him go right now. Harry had too much knowledge of his father’s activities, too much chance of finding him, that Malfoy didn’t have on his own. He stood up. “We should see what we can learn if we ask the Mysterious Oracle.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him. His mouth had been open, as though he was going to continue the ridiculous line of thought that he and Harry should part ways now, but he shut it with a snap. “The _Mysterious Oracle_?” he said a moment later. “Is that another name for your common sense?”  
  
“Because it’s so unfamiliar to me, you mean?” Harry reached out to ruffle Malfoy’s hair, which he didn’t duck away from in time, probably because he couldn’t believe that someone would actually try that. “No. It’s the name of someone in Diagon Alley who offers answers to very specific questions if you bring payment along.”  
  
Malfoy smoothed his hair down with one furiously moving hand, while the other clenched into a fist. “If you’d told me about that,” he said, “I would have gone there in the first place, and I could have been spared this ordeal.”  
  
Harry fluttered his eyelashes at him. “Don’t say that, sweetheart! We never would have got to know each other otherwise.”  
  
“What makes you think I _wanted_ to get to know you?”  
  
Harry smiled and reached for his cloak, which he smoothed carefully around his neck. The Oracle was particular about appearances, sometimes. Of course Malfoy would satisfy it; he was groomed already, despite the disruption Harry had wrought to his hair. “Maybe you didn’t at first, but now you need to ask yourself: How else can he be useful to me beyond the immediate matter of finding out where my father is?”  
  
Malfoy’s mouth clamped shut, and he stared at Harry.   
  
“I _knew_ it,” Harry said, with a wise little nod. “You _were_ thinking that. What you were trying to do is important, right, and you had to hire me for that—it wouldn’t have done you any good to go to the Oracle even if you knew about it, because your question was too broad-ranging. But now you’re wondering how else to use my gift of seeing lies.” To Malfoy, he could use the word “gift” without being ironic. It had brought Malfoy into his life, and that was worth a great deal. “What other applications could it have? Could I help you reestablish your life now that I’ve fucked a lot of it up, like with Flint and Corinna? Could I help you tell when someone selling you expensive ingredients is lying? What about it?”  
  
“There is no reason for me to keep you around,” Malfoy said, his voice low and charged. “You cause more trouble than you’re worth. And after I pay you what I owe you for this investigation, you’ll go away and have your ability to detect lies removed. That makes you much less valuable.”  
  
Harry bowed his head and extended his hands. “What if I said that, provided you kept me around, the only payment I would want is your company?”  
  
Malfoy gaped at him again.  
  
“I’m serious,” Harry said, and met his eyes, and tried to speak as calmly and steadily as he knew how, while keeping in mind that Malfoy wouldn’t have much reason to believe him. “I don’t need the money that you can offer me. Over time, I could get used to seeing lies. It’s brought me more happiness in the last few days than I knew it could. It’s brought me you.”  
  
Malfoy shook his head. The familiar sneer was back, and Harry considered ways to banish it even as he listened to Malfoy’s words. “You make no sense, Potter .Talking like you’re bloody _in love_ with me, when you can’t be, not after a few days.”  
  
Harry sighed. “So many things about my life don’t make sense, Malfoy, that I decided long ago I had to make my own sense. I survived the Killing Curse, and the wizarding world reveres me to a ridiculous extent, as you saw yourself on Azkaban, and I’m the only Auror who has artifacts explode on me like this. I value your company, and I find you handsome and charming. It’s not being in love, maybe. It’s a good beginning to build on, though.”  
  
Malfoy took one step backwards, and then another. Harry moved towards him, hand still out, reassuring words on his lips.  
  
Malfoy shut his eyes and flung up his hands as though to hold Harry at bay with a wall. Harry moved back and waited, his own heart thundering louder in his ears than he had thought it would. Malfoy took a few minutes to breathe, and then slowly lifted his head and opened his eyes.  
  
“One more time,” he whispered. “We’ll be together one more time. One more mission, to find this Oracle and ask it the question you thought of. And then that’s the _end,_ Potter. I’ll send you the contact information for the Potions master I told you about, and we’re even, and we’re done.”  
  
Harry lowered his eyes. He knew Malfoy might see something there to make him change that offer even further, perhaps say that he _never_ wished to see Harry again, and that was something Harry couldn’t abide and wouldn’t jeopardize his chances for.  
  
“Just once,” Malfoy said, and his voice was as gentle as, Harry thought, he could make it, for all that he sounded rather peculiar. “Just—you’ll see in the end, Potter, that I’m doing this as much for your good as mine. It’s not good for you, to be with me.”  
  
Harry stared at him. Then he circled around Malfoy and stared at his back. Malfoy turned to keep pace with him, but not fast enough; it seemed to have occurred to him only a moment later that Harry might have wanted to stare at his arse, and he clapped one of his own hands to it. Harry sighed in envy of that hand.   
  
“What are you _doing_?” Malfoy’s voice had gone chill, and he had become that gracefully-moving, flowing figure again that Harry had seen in the Leaky Cauldron the first day they had met. “Do you think you can intimidate me out of my rightful decision? And it is my decision, not yours, to make. Most of the choices that we have in this investigation have been mine, whether you let me make them or not.”  
  
“I was just wondering if I would see some sign of your glamour fading at the back,” Harry said, and then stood on his toes and peered at the top of Malfoy’s head. “No, no red hair there, either.”  
  
Malfoy touched a hand to his hair this time, but his face was flushing as if scalded, and there was all the red that Harry could ask for there. “What?” he whispered. “You think—you _dare_ —you would say that—”  
  
“Yes, I think, yes, I dare, yes, I would say that,” Harry said, standing back and shaking his head at Malfoy with a grin. “Because the only people who would go on about you not being good enough for me, frankly, are Weasleys. And I thought one of them might have kidnapped you and decided to glamour themselves in your place so they could send me away. God knows what they would do with you if they kidnapped you, either,” he added cheerfully, thinking about it. “It would probably depend on which one took you. Arthur would try to let you go someplace with a Memory Charm on you so you wouldn’t come near me again. George would keep you tied up and use you for experiments. Bill would lock you up in some ancient tomb and—”  
  
“Are you trying to threaten me?” Malfoy said, and his voice was so low that Harry had to concentrate to make out the words. “Are you trying to imply that your friends would do something to me if I don’t become your lover?”  
  
“If you _did_ ,” Harry told him, with the kind of patient look that he knew would drive Malfoy mad. “That’s what you’re talking about, aren’t you? Walking away from me. Deciding that you can’t be with me because it wouldn’t be _good_.” He rolled his eyes. “Grow up and embrace the Slytherin inside you, Malfoy. Since when did you care about acting _good_?”   
  
Malfoy opened his eyes wide and closed them again. Harry watched him, wondering if that was a peculiar series of eye exercises he’d never heard of.  
  
“There’s a difference between what’s good for you and what’s good for me,” Malfoy retorted in a whisper. “I’m trying to protect you, can’t you see that? You act so _strange_ around me. Whether you enjoy tormenting me because of our past or because I’m a way to flaunt to the Ministry that you’re not as obedient as they think, it doesn’t matter. You should still get away from me and start living a normal life again.”  
  
Harry tried. He manfully tried. He bit his lip and bowed his head and sought for a serious expression that he could paste on his face. But in the end, it was just all too much, and he ended up staggering back and sitting down on the floor as he burst out laughing.  
  
Malfoy stiffened and glared at him.   
  
Harry shook his head. “And I think I’ve made it clear by now that I don’t hate you based on our past, given that I’m willing to work with you. You can believe me a heartless mercenary who’s only doing this for the reward you promised me, if you want, but _still_. I would have sabotaged the investigation by now if I hated you.”  
  
Malfoy said nothing, only stood there with his arms folded and his appearance so ruffled that Harry had to bite his lip again. This time, it at least served to let him get the last giggles out of his system.  
  
“And if I wanted to show you off to the Ministry,” Harry said, sitting up and wiping his eyes, “why would I have kept you a secret in the Ministry? I could have removed the Cloak at any time and revealed you.”  
  
Malfoy smiled, his teeth bright and his eyes shadowed. “Is that what you think? I have my own secrets.”  
  
 _Yes, like how to get through the wards on a Ministry interrogation room._ Harry still had no idea how he had managed that, either.  
  
But it was something he could ask about later. He leaned forwards and fixed his eyes on Malfoy’s face. “In the meantime, you haven’t considered the simplest explanation, and one would think that you really _would_. What about if I fancy you? Is that so hard to imagine? I’ve told you why. And I can see when you’re lying, remember. For the most part, you’ve tried to remember that.”  
  
Malfoy stood there with his face turning steadily pink. Harry found himself filled with an obscure pity as he watched. _He’s really not used to being complimented, is he? Maybe not on anything that doesn’t have to do with brewing skill, anyway. Maybe if I had started out praising his potions, he would have believed me more._  
  
But the _point_ was that he didn’t have to believe Harry completely. He just had to believe him enough to put off trying stupid tricks like this.  
  
“You must have seen that I believe you getting away from me is the best thing for both of us,” Malfoy said at last. “Because you would have seen the red glow around my head if I was lying to you.”  
  
Harry sighed pityingly. “Believing you when you say something like that is a very long way from thinking that it would be best myself.” He scrambled up and dusted himself off. “Besides, we’re wasting time. You promised me one last mission, to the Oracle, one last adventure together.”  
  
“Yes…” Malfoy said, still staring. “And having it over so soon is what you wish to do?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “The sooner we have it, the sooner I get to enjoy your company one last time. And the sooner it’s over, the sooner you’re rid of me. And the sooner we continue our investigation, the sooner we can find out what happened to your father, and the less chance Kingsley has to slip away from us.” He waved the parchment with its duplicated signatures again. “I believe that it was him who wrote this letter. But I still want to know why, and that’s not something I’m going to learn by sitting around this kitchen chatting to you.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him, then gave a sudden series of jerky nods and rose to his feet. “I don’t understand why you fancy me,” he muttered, as he passed Harry.  
  
Harry looked closely, but there was nothing, not even the faint trace of a sunset glow. Not fishing for compliments, then.  
  
“Because you’re beautiful and graceful all around,” Harry said.  
  
Malfoy jerked as though Harry had knifed him, and then kept walking. Harry shrugged and followed him. Malfoy ought to have the ability himself to tell when someone was lying; it was probably the only way he would consent to believe Harry.  
  
*  
  
“This is your Oracle?”  
  
Harry was glad that he was facing away from Malfoy so he could safely roll his eyes. He _needed_ to roll his eyes, it was something he required, but it was silly for him to act as though Harry had invented the Oracle and was showing it to him out of—spite, or something sillier, simply because he had never heard of it before.   
  
“Not the building,” Harry said. “The person inside it.” He stepped easily forwards, past the illusion of stone walls and the wards that guarded it at the same time. The Oracle would repel visitors who didn’t honestly seek it, or people who wanted to take it apart and find out how it worked. Harry had learned that the hard way, the first time he wandered into the building to gratify some idle curiosity and found his nose almost plastered across his face because he’d run straight into stone.  
  
He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if hearing that story would cheer Malfoy up, and found him standing still, staring around. Harry gestured impatiently to him. “Don’t tell me that you’re _honestly_ doubting me,” he said. “The Oracle won’t let you in if you don’t want the answer.” Something else occurred to him, and he frowned. “Or if you don’t have payment, but we do, so I don’t know why—”  
  
“You expect me to pay for this, of course,” Malfoy interrupted. His head was high, his cheeks flushed, his whole body as tense and strained as though he was walking with poles thrust through the middles of his legs.  
  
Harry took great pleasure, given that, in meeting his eyes and saying quietly, “No, I don’t. I’m going to pay for it. God knows that I’ve got enough Galleons in my vaults.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him, his breath fast. Harry might have been worried about the audience they’d attracted, but they were inside the illusion now, and anyone else who passed would see only the small, squat, thick-walled building. Very few actually sought the Oracle, and Harry didn’t know how it kept alive. Then Malfoy said, “I will pay for it.”  
  
“You can if you want,” Harry said.  
  
Malfoy shook his head. His hands shook at his sides. He said, “ _Stop it.”_  
  
“Stop what?” Harry looked down at his hands, wondering if Malfoy was once again ordering him to stop something that he couldn’t, such as being a good Auror or detecting lies.  
  
“Stop acting as though—stop offering to pay for things and trying to get into my good graces,” Malfoy finished in a rush. “It’s not going to work, you know.”  
  
“Oh, I know that,” Harry said. “If compliments and telling you the truth and making you feel good don’t get me into your good graces, telling you that I have money of my own and can pay for things won’t.”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes and pressed one hand to the middle of his forehead. The hand still shook. “You make it sound as though you mean it, when you say you fancy me,” he whispered. “And it’s _impossible._ ”  
  
Harry could work his way through that peculiar logic without much trouble, which was good, he thought, because Malfoy wasn’t inclined to explain it. Malfoy expected Harry to ask for money, or at least for Harry to rely on him because he was the one who had hired Harry in the first place. But by saying that he had money, Harry said that he had some independence, and also said that he cared enough to spend those Galleons on Malfoy.  
  
Which meant, under everything else, a real sign of caring for someone like Malfoy, who had probably grown up with his parents buying him expensive gifts.  
  
Harry made his voice as gentle as he could. “Come on. We’re not going to get to the Oracle by standing out here and arguing. We can discuss payment when the Oracle actually demands it.”  
  
And he turned and walked further into the building. He counted one, two, three heartbeats before he heard the noise of Malfoy’s footsteps following.  
  
Harry smiled and glanced down at his stained hands. At the moment, he would almost have liked to thank the Unspeakables who had invented that artifact.


	15. An Oracle Less Mysterious

  
"This is the room where your Mysterious Oracle lives?"  
  
Harry kept his mouth shut as he shook his head, because trying to explain at this point would only lead to Malfoy coming up with more misconceptions, and Harry was getting to the horrifying point where he no longer found those misconceptions as charming as he once had. What would he do if he ran out of the ability to find them charming altogether?  
  
"Well? _Answer_ me."  
  
"You're demanding for someone who thinks that we should split up for our own good," Harry said mildly, and sidestepped the hand Malfoy had used to reach for him. "There's one more corner." He nodded ahead at the blank brick wall ahead of them, which ended in a round, blunt shape that _did_ make it difficult to see the end of the wall against the corridor from beyond. Still, Harry thought disapprovingly, a Potions master should have better eyes than that.  
  
Then he remembered about the way Malfoy had stared at him when Harry said he fancied him, and smothered a sigh of irritation.   
  
"Anyway," Harry continued, because thinking too much about Malfoy's obliviousness would only depress him, and he hated being depressed, "there's one more room. _That's_ the one the Oracle lives in."  
  
He stepped around the corner, and felt Malfoy follow him. That was the only good thing about Malfoy's distrust of him: it made him think he had to keep Harry under observation at all times, which occasionally led to a delicious shiver like now, when Malfoy's knee had just brushed Harry's arse.  
  
The room beyond the corner was still not one that Malfoy would have called impressive, probably, but it would have been a haven of space to Harry when he lived at the Dursleys'. He reckoned that was a sign of a great and profound difference, and so a great and profound truth, between them, but he didn't have the patience to figure it out right now.  
  
"Hullo, Oracle," he said to the shape in the middle of the room.  
  
It looked like an eddying mass of purple smoke, though Harry had never dared breathe it and figure out whether it was _real_ smoke. It formed, more or less, the shape of a high-sided chair that also looked like a bathtub, and in the center of the chair squatted a massive human body. Well, sort of human. You had to ignore the extra eyes, tentacles, and heads.  
  
Harry was good at that, though. He reckoned that childhood years of pretending Dudley was human had also encouraged him to do it with everything else.  
  
"You come," said a low, bubbling voice. Maybe the smoke hid water. It moved in that heavy way sometimes; a stream of it was making its way from the top of the bottom of the Oracle now, like liquid that someone was slowly tipping from a bowl. "You come to ask--questions?" The last word was a whip-quick dart.  
  
"I do," Harry said, and grinned as he watched the Oracle try to turn itself inside out, the edges of the smoke becoming pink and white and then gradually settling back towards purple.  
  
"You _cannot_ ," the Oracle said. "I will answer only one."  
  
"Yes, but it's so much fun to watch you remember the difference between the plural and the singular and the fact that other people sometimes use them interchangeably," Harry murmured, and turned to face Malfoy. "I think I ought to ask the question. I can make it specific enough."  
  
Malfoy turned to stare at him. "What _is_ this?"  
  
"Not a charade, if that's what you mean," Harry said, blinking a little. He hadn't expected that Malfoy would come so far and still manage to disbelieve _this_. Shouldn't it be obvious that the magic that made the Oracle was beyond anything Harry was capable of? "You can ask your question--well, _I_ can ask your question--and you'll get an answer."  
  
"But what is it?" Malfoy hissed in a whisper into Harry's ear. It was so pleasant that Harry decided not to tell him the Oracle could hear everything that was said in its room. He would find out in a minute anyway. "What is it _made_ of? You _have_ to tell me."  
  
"I don't know the answer to that myself," Harry pointed out with a mild nod, and faced the Oracle. "Name your price."  
  
There was more silence, during which the Oracle's shifting shape settled back into more humanity, and Harry could see two heads, one like an elephant's and one like a dragon's, staring at him. He resisted the urge to cross his eyes. Sometimes the Oracle imitated what it saw humanity do, but watching two large, moist eyes exchange their place with two reptilian ones was more excitement than Harry wanted for this afternoon.  
  
"A hundred Galleons," the Oracle answered at last.  
  
Malfoy squawked. Harry nodded. The Oracle had no notion of relative value, really. It simply chose numbers and then watched the reactions of the people visiting it. He had no idea what it did with the money, but then, considering he didn't know what it was made of or what it ate, either, its shopping was one of his lesser concerns.  
  
"Done," he said, and pulled out the heavy pouch of money he had removed from its hiding place in his home while Malfoy was in the bathroom. There were limits to how much he was willing to trust someone who wouldn't even acknowledge that Harry was infatuated with him.  
  
"What?" Malfoy hissed, grabbing his arm. "How can you just decide that when it hasn't heard the question?"  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows a little. "You think a question about your father is worth more than any other I could ask?" Maybe Malfoy _did_ think that, if he hated the idea of spending one more afternoon in Harry's company, but that didn't compel Harry to give up more money than the Oracle had required.  
  
"You _don't_ know it needs a hundred Galleons to tell you the truth," Malfoy said, and faced the Oracle with his arms folded. "Bargain."  
  
Harry put a hand over his face. Malfoy turned around and caught him at it, which meant he missed the Oracle's next spectacular, silent explosion, which consisted of red puffs of smoke shooting out sideways and which Harry thought strangely impressive. "What?" Malfoy demanded. "You're thinking the worse of me because I try to _save_ you money?"  
  
"I told you already why I was willing to spend it," Harry muttered, shaking his head. "And I'm wondering why you're willing to be cheap about this _now_ , when you've done a lot of things that are distasteful to you in the name of finding your father. Such as hiring me, and spending time around me, and letting me pay for this." He met Malfoy's gaze and held it.  
  
Malfoy flushed with color all the way up his throat, something Harry hadn't known he would find as fascinating as he did. "I never said that I _hated_ to spend time with you," he corrected stiffly.  
  
"Really?" Harry waved his hand around at the Oracle's building. "Because you seemed fixated on the notion that we would come here, and spend one more 'adventure' together, and after that, you would be free to do whatever you want."  
  
"I didn't mean--"  
  
"No bargains." The Oracle was now in the shape of the human body with the elephant's and dragon's heads, but hanging upside-down, and floating with its "arms" on either side of the chair. "A hundred Galleons. Then I answer."  
  
Harry tossed the sack of Galleons at it before Malfoy could object. It hit the center of the purple smoke and disappeared with an enormous hissing sound that was more like steam. Malfoy turned and glared at him.  
  
Harry met his eyes and shrugged. "You didn't want gifts from me anyway," he said. "You can hardly object to how I choose to spend them."  
  
Malfoy was opening his mouth to dispute that anyway, it looked like, when the Oracle made a grumbling, burbling sound, and Harry shushed Malfoy. The Oracle wasn't above making some of its words so soft that you would lose the answer to the question, or not realize when it was time to ask it.  
  
"Ask your question," the Oracle said, and turned a number of colors that mingled rose, red, and white.  
  
Harry took a deep breath and did so. "What is the full story of Lucius Malfoy's life from the time he left Azkaban this year?"  
  
The Oracle turned deep purple, and its four eyes glared at Harry. Harry could feel Malfoy gaping behind him, too. He ignored both of them, not even bothering to fold his arms. It had been the best question he could think of to ask, since it left the Oracle no room to fob them off with a single-word answer, and didn't let it tell them the story of Lucius's life from the time he had been arrested during the first or second war, either.  
  
The Oracle muttered and gulped and mumbled, and finally said, "He had a letter. He did not know who the letter was from. He panicked. He knew he might have enemies coming for him, and that they had chosen to mask their enmity under affection to fool the guards.  
  
"He did not speak to any of the guards because he feared they might disbelieve him. He hid the letter, and a second one when it came. The second letter frightened him far more. It spoke of an obsession with him, and an obsession with the cleanness and goodliness of his soul. He feared he might be sacrificed."  
  
Malfoy opened his mouth to interrupt. Harry nudged him hard in the ribs with one elbow. It made him gasp and wheeze, and Harry decided to tell him later that even that sound was beautiful.  
  
"Then the one who had written the letter came." The Oracle glared triumphantly at Harry, spouting a third head, like a hydra's, in order to do it with. Harry didn't turn a hair. They knew who had written that letter, though he had a hard time believing it of Kingsley. "They would have granted him anything he wanted, given who he was. They gave him Lucius Malfoy. But he _Obliviated_ the guards, and they thought it was an escape. It was easy to _Obliviate_ them," the Oracle added. "They are not very wise."  
  
It was the Oracle's worst condemnation of anyone, and as much as he hated giving the Oracle anything to hang onto, Harry found that he could only agree. He nodded, though, instead of speaking. The Oracle would seize on anything anyone said as another question, and use that as the excuse to interrupt its recitation.  
  
The third head sank back into the Oracle's shoulders, and it sighed gustily. "Lucius Malfoy was in the Ministry for three days. He is not now. He is in the nest." And it shut its eyes, dissolved into a shapeless, floating puff of smoke, and eddied around and into the cracks in the brick.  
  
" _That's_ no answer," Malfoy said loudly.  
  
Harry raised a hand. "Thank you, O Wise and Powerful and Mysterious Oracle," he said, and bowed his head. "We thank you for your wisdom." And he turned and walked out of the room, taking a little pleasure in hearing Malfoy scramble to keep up with him.  
  
Only a little, though. He was thinking. The Oracle would usually add more riddles than that, but it seemed the specificity of Harry's question had helped this time. Only another reason to ask it himself, and pay for the answer, instead of letting Malfoy ask it, Harry knew. Malfoy would have wasted the question on something like, "Is my father in the custody of the Minister?"  
  
 _The nest._ It wasn't a very complicated riddle, not by some of the standards of the ones that Harry had solved.  
  
"What the _fuck_."  
  
Harry turned and raised an eyebrow at Malfoy. "Upset that we might have to stay together until we figure out what the last riddle means?"  
  
Malfoy stomped up to him and leaned down, breathing into his face. Harry reached up one hand, knowing he was taking a risk but unable to imagine doing it any other way, and towards the side of his hair. Malfoy didn't seem to realize what he was doing until Harry's fingers lightly brushed his head, and then he danced backwards and glared at him, forgetting whatever he might have said.  
  
"Yes?" Harry whispered, bowing his head and fluttering his eyelashes for all he was worth. "Did you have something to--say to me?"  
  
Malfoy folded his hands into fists and turned his back, glaring at the brick walls of the Oracle's building now, as if they had been the ones that deceived him, or disappointed him, or whatever other unimaginable thing beginning with the letter d Malfoy thought Harry had done to him. "I don't understand why it told us everything else so clearly and then hid the last answer," he whispered harshly.  
  
Harry shrugged. It was a magnificent shrug, a real roll of his shoulders with a lot of insouciance added, and completely ruined because Malfoy didn't turn and look at him while he did it. Harry sighed. "It wasn't completely clear. The only reason you think it was is that we spent so much time hunting and learned so much before we came here. Otherwise, how would we have known who wrote the letters to him? Someone high-ranking in the Ministry is all we would have had to reckon on."  
  
Malfoy went on snorting like a teakettle for a minute, and then said, "So Kingsley Shacklebolt is in on the conspiracy to destroy my father's soul."  
  
"No," Harry corrected gently. "I think Kingsley--or someone else, because if your father isn't in the Ministry anymore _someone_ must have removed him--is in love with your father."  
  
Malfoy turned to him and said nothing. His jaw had simply silently dropped open, and he shook his head back and forth. Harry was compelled to admit he found even that attractive.  
  
"He hid his intentions under sticky, sappy words to deceive the guards," Malfoy said, in the kind of tone that begged Harry to agree with him.  
  
Harry sighed. "No, I don't think so. The first time I really read the letter, instead of just reading it to you, I thought it sounded like a lover's letter. God knows how or why my boss fell in love with your father, but there you are. It would be unthinkable of him to Memory Charm his own guards and remove your father from their custody, sure. But I don't think someone who would do that would then be evil enough to want to destroy his soul. Why not just destroy the guards? Trick them in some way that would result in them losing their jobs? No, I think Kingsley is secretly infatuated, not secretly evil."  
  
Malfoy fell back a step from Harry and pointed a trembling finger at him. Harry blinked in return, not understanding.  
  
"You're like that," Malfoy whispered.  
  
"Secretly evil?" Harry folded his arms and snorted. "I resent that. Everything you could have called me evil for, I've done _quite_ openly."  
  
Malfoy swished his head back and forth. His eyes remained wide and staring, "Falling in love with a Malfoy," he said. "When you're an Auror and a symbol of good in the wizarding world and there's no _reason_ for you to do it. I'll have to research. Did someone secretly cast a curse on my generation? On my father's? Was it at the trials? Did you--"  
  
Harry gave into another deep longing and stepped smartly closer. Malfoy at once fell silent, seeming hardly able to breathe.   
  
Harry slapped him smartly on the side of the head, and Malfoy caught his wrist and glared, which was better by far than that pathetic babbling.  
  
"I like you because of the way you move," Harry said fiercely into his face. "Because you picked yourself up and told Corinna that you would forge a new life when I disrupted your old one by taking the sapphire from her. Because you fell in line with me at once and trusted me when I told you Flint and the others were lying. Because you're graceful and clever and I think what you want more than anything else is to be _free_ of the shadows of the past, rather than enslaved to them the way you will be if your father stays out of Azkaban, and the only times that you act really stupid now are when you babble at me about how horrible it is that I like you. Because you told the truth and you had the courage to come seeking the help of an old enemy in the first place. Because you can take the blows to your pride and roll with them. Because you're beautiful and have good hands and come _here,_ you clever idiot." He seized Malfoy's head, tugged it down, and kissed him.  
  
And Malfoy, despite his faltering hands, despite his mumbled protests, despite his stupidity about curses and what was right in front of him and all the rest of it, kissed back.


	16. Learning the Riddle

  
“Not here.”  
  
Malfoy’s voice was breathy and passionate, and Harry had to open his eyes and come back a long way from the distance he had fallen inside himself to listen to the words instead of the tone. He found Malfoy hunching his back and flicking his eyes around from side to side as if he expected someone to circle the corner and hold out his arm accusingly. Harry laughed and touched his face. “Nothing and no one lives here except the Oracle,” he said.  
  
Malfoy pulled back. “Which probably knows everything that just happened,” he muttered, but at least he didn’t wipe his mouth and turn away like Harry had thought he would.  
  
“I don’t think it cares unless we pay it, or unless someone comes here and asks it,” Harry responded, and linked his fingers with Malfoy’s. He was ridiculously happy. He would have liked to dance and shout and sing, but he knew Malfoy wouldn’t thank him for that. “Come on. We need to discuss what we’re going to do next.”  
  
Malfoy swallowed and tagged after him, still turning his head from side to side in anticipation of who knew what. “Isn’t it obvious? We need to decide what the Oracle meant about my father being in the nest.”  
  
Harry raised an eyebrow at him. “And with your brain and mine both working on that, do you think that it will take us _that_ long? I don’t think so. We can also have sex.” He ran his hand admiringly down Malfoy’s flank to his leg, and Malfoy jumped and skittered away from him as though Harry was a stranger in the street. No, if he was a stranger in the street, Harry decided, annoyance growing again, Malfoy would have looked at him with less horror.  
  
“We can wait _a little_ ,” Malfoy said.   
  
“If you want,” Harry said, and pulled his hand back with a sigh. Malfoy wasn’t in public right now, with him, and Harry doubted that he made such a practice of defending his virtue with every lover. That he’d accepted Harry as a lover seemed clear. He’d kissed back, hadn’t he?  
  
 _But he didn’t say anything in response to my speech. About whether he believed it, or accepted it, or—anything._  
  
That made Harry scowl all the more, and when they stepped out onto the street, he could cheerfully have shoved Malfoy. Turning to him with his mouth open, Malfoy caught his eye and blinked. “What?”  
  
“We’re going home,” Harry said. “And then we’ll _talk_ about this.” He Apparated without much caring who saw them. News that he was with Malfoy would already be circulating in some parts of the wizarding world, the ones that Corinna and Flint and their ilk frequented, and there was no one in sight at the moment.  
  
 _Malfoy probably prefers that._  
  
If he did, Harry was willing to make love in a dark room with the sheets tugged up to their chins. But he was going to find out, once and for all, what the source of Malfoy’s problems with having him for a lover was before he did that.  
  
*  
  
Malfoy paced away from him when they arrived back at Harry’s house, his arms folded around his body and his eyes shuttered. Harry leaned back against the bookshelves and shook his head.  
  
“Do you hate me in general?” he asked. “Or are you a member of a cult that’s sworn to only have one-night stands and otherwise flagellate themselves in private?” He thought of the way Malfoy had tried to explain that it wouldn’t be “good” for Harry to stay with him, and snorted. “Public, too, come to that.”  
  
Malfoy looked at him and blinked. “What are you babbling about?”  
  
“I’m trying to determine why you blow hot and cold on me,” Harry said. “Seem to believe me, kiss me back, and earlier, touch me all the more willingly, and then loudly declare it’s a mistake and you have something else to do. If you were being faithful to someone else, either a real lover or a memory, I would have expected protests about that instead of, you know, expecting me to guess it from your behavior.”  
  
“There’s no other lover.” A faint red flush worked its way down from Malfoy’s forehead and joined up across his cheekbones. “I would never have touched you in the first place if there was, and the fact that you think I would only shows your _real_ estimate of me.”  
  
Harry stared at him very hard. The flush deepened, and Malfoy held up his head as though he was preparing to charge a well-hold position on an Auror raid and wanted to make sure that his partner saw his face before he died.  
  
“Oh, I _see_ ,” Harry said, and smiled. The joy flooded him like morning light from the east. “You want me to think of you as still a coward. You want me to think that you’re exactly like you were in school, and that means that you _must_ be uninterested in someone like me, because all you care about is your family and your House affiliation.” He shook his head. “Too bad. You already know I think differently of you, and I know that you’ve changed.”  
  
“I’m a much worse person than you think I am,” Malfoy said, struggling to keep his voice clam and level, at least from the way it bobbed. “Still a coward, yes. Not possessed of such noble motivations as you choose to attribute to me.”  
  
Harry thrust a finger at him. “Then why _are_ you so eager to make sure that your father goes back to Azkaban rather than stays free? And remember, I’ll know if you lie.”  
  
Malfoy’s eyes locked on Harry, and widened. Harry smiled, and cocked his head to the side. “No red yet,” he remarked. “Though your lies generally show up more crimson, when they appear. I wish you could see them. You would never again argue that you aren’t beautiful.”  
  
Malfoy stood there, in silence, his hands down at his sides. But he didn’t lower his head, and that made Harry smile and nod. Malfoy was caught on the hook now. If he wanted to insist that he was ignoble and unworthy and had reasons for his actions that would drive Harry off, then he had to _reveal_ them. And if those reasons didn’t really exist and he tried to lie, then Harry would know straight off.  
  
Finally, Malfoy groaned and put his hands over his face. “Fine,” he muttered. “Potter, it’s just—I never phrased it to myself the way _you_ did. I never said that I wanted to be free of my father and the shadow he cast over my life, and therefore I should make sure that he was out of the way and get him arrested.”  
  
“Neither did I,” Harry said. “You see the beauty you can add to the words, when you actually start speaking the phrases?”   
  
Malfoy tore his hands down and glared at Harry. “ _Be serious_.”  
  
Harry stuck out his lip at him. “I don’t wanna.”  
  
Malfoy turned and sat down on the couch. “I didn’t put it in _your words_ ,” he said. “I don’t recognize myself from the description you gave me. Maybe—maybe someone else could see me that way. I won’t deny it, if you keep insisting on it. Although, remember, I don’t have the same assurance that _you’re_ telling the truth,” he added, with a slashing and darting glance over his shoulder at Harry.  
  
“I’m willing to take Veritaserum if you want me to,” Harry said.  
  
Malfoy’s hands tightened on the edges of the cushion, and his face became the same deep, passionate mask he had showed earlier when Harry offered to pay for the Oracle. “Stop _making offers like that._ ”  
  
Harry considered him some more, then nodded. “And _that_ bothers you because it shows you that I’m serious, and doesn’t allow you to continue lying to yourself about what I want and how sincere I am.”  
  
Once again, he got a closing of Malfoy’s eyes and a turn of that elegant head away, but Harry was a little more confident this time. Malfoy _had_ to see, damnit, that there was no escaping this. The truth stared him in the face everywhere he looked.  
  
“You want something from me that I don’t know if I can give you,” Malfoy whispered. “Your expectations are so _high_. This was supposed to be something convenient for me, something I could take advantage of—your truth-telling powers, I mean—to get my father back into prison. I never counted on finding something like this.”  
  
And no trace of a lie. Not even the rippling reflection of a far-distant sunset, the way Harry had sometimes seen when one of the testing Unspeakables had made a prediction that he was a little unsure of.  
  
Harry dropped down in front of Malfoy and touched his knee, bringing the git’s attention back to him. “I know,” he whispered. “I know it’s hard. Not to be able to control what’s happening around you, the way you would when you brew a potion.”  
  
Malfoy jerked back hard, staring at him in outrage. “You think this is only happening because I like _control_?”  
  
Harry grinned. Yes, he preferred this version of Malfoy, the spitting, sparking, snapping, snarling one, like a cross between a cat and an Ashwinder. “Not _only_ ,” he said. “I would never say _only_ where you are concerned.”  
  
“I don’t know that I could stay with you even if I could admit this is something that might last,” Malfoy said crossly, locking his hands over Harry’s wrists. “You would challenge me at every turn, take every word I try to say that’s honest and humble and turn it against me.”  
  
“You aren’t meant to be humble.” Harry tilted his head back, enjoying Malfoy’s eyes, the gleam of them, the way he twisted his neck to the side as if looking at Harry from a literally different angle would help him comprehend Harry better. “But honest? Be that all you want. I _like_ that.”  
  
He infused his words with as much innuendo as he could, and saw the effect in the way Malfoy’s mouth came open, the hard way he exhaled, the path his eyes traced across Harry’s face. Harry smiled to himself. Malfoy was the most seductive person he had ever seen, but that didn’t mean Harry was helpless, either.   
  
“If I’m honest,” Malfoy said, and then paused.  
  
“Hesitating isn’t being.”  
  
Malfoy hurtled ahead the way Harry had known he would. “Then I want to fuck you.”  
  
“You think I would say no?” Harry lay back, sinking slowly to the floor with Malfoy’s hands still on his wrists, and crossed his arms above his head, forcing Malfoy to rearrange his hold but not breaking it. Keeping Malfoy’s gaze on him, he arched his hips and widened his legs. “I say _yes, yes, yes._ ”  
  
Malfoy hovered one moment more. Harry felt everything waiting around them in that moment, and enjoyed it immensely.  
  
And then Malfoy broke, and dived at him.  
  
Harry rolled to the side, and kissed Malfoy all over his face, while Malfoy seemed more intent on stripping them both of their clothes. Harry didn’t care. He never had to break contact with Malfoy, and that was the most important thing.  
  
They kissed and rolled and fought, and their breath was heavy in the air between them and their fingers were fumbling and impatient but on target, and then Harry’s shirt was gone and Malfoy’s had at least slid down his shoulders. Harry pressed his chest up against Malfoy’s, closing his eyes as he groaned. He was _hungry_ , and it wasn’t enough to feel slim muscles and scars against his, but it was a start.  
  
“Have to,” Malfoy whispered, his hands shaking on Harry’s shoulders.  
  
Harry opened his eyes, smiling, and hooked his legs around Malfoy’s waist while he muttered a charm.  
  
The clothes flowed away from them, falling to the floor, peeling off rather than Vanishing. Harry had learned that one after a particularly bitter fight with a past lover whose favorite robe he’d Vanished. Harry maintained it had been an accident, but it had been less trouble to learn the spell than go through the argument again.  
  
Malfoy knelt there and looked at him with dazed eyes. Harry turned his head a little and held up his hand, and the lube he’d Summoned crashed into his hand at that moment, smacking into his palm so he could close his fingers around it because he was _just_ that wonderful.  
  
“Here,” he said, and offered the lube to Malfoy.  
  
Malfoy blinked at him, blinked at the lube, and blinked at Harry’s arse. Harry reached down and spread it with his fingers, grinning up at Malfoy. “Yes, it is quite a fine one,” he said. “But at the moment, I don’t want you to look at it as if you’d never seen one before. I want you to fuck it. You can worship later.”  
  
“You want _me_ to fuck _you_?” Malfoy whispered.  
  
Harry looked hard at him, but there really was no red glow around his head, and no innocently surprised expression, either, the way there would have been if he was fishing for compliments. He nodded. “I want it, and you want it,” he said. “You just _said_ you did.” Surely not even Malfoy could change his mind that many times in five minutes. “What’s the problem?”  
  
Malfoy just shuddered a little and accepted the lube. Harry closed his fingers around his hole when Malfoy would have reached for it, though. “No,” he said flatly. “You have _some_ kind of problem with this. What is it?”  
  
Malfoy hesitated, then said, “I can see you sacrificing yourself for someone else, to make them comfortable. But I can’t see you really getting as much pleasure as all that out of _me_ fucking you.”  
  
Harry stared at him, then reached out and cupped his chin, kissing him gently. Malfoy kissed back, exploring with tongue and teeth until he was the one pushing Harry onto the floor, crouching above him and nipping.  
  
“I want you,” Harry whispered. “And I’m selfish with my pleasure in a way that I’m not always with everything else. You’d know that, if you’d paid attention to the way I chased you so far.”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes and shuddered. His face was brilliant with color, and Harry couldn’t help reaching up to cup and trace his cheeks. Malfoy ended up burying his head in Harry’s shoulder in response.  
  
“Come on,” Harry said, when he thought enough time had passed to get Malfoy over this last attack of nerves.  
  
And Malfoy was purpose itself after that, stretching Harry with old expertise, and watching his face all the time, and sliding into him without trying to make things more comfortable for him, which Harry loved. He willingly spread his legs and lifted them and splayed them and sighed and locked them into place around Malfoy’s waist when he could.  
  
He _wanted_ this. And if Malfoy cared more about the sex now than Harry, or cared more for the way that Harry admired him and paid for things than he cared for Harry himself, then that was still one challenge past. As long as he didn’t _run away,_ Harry was confident of his ability to persuade him round.  
  
Malfoy rode him with heart-pounding intensity, making sweat start to life on Harry’s skin, making him curse and give up more than he’d meant to, at least in gasps and grunts and exhaustion. And in the end, Malfoy was the one who reached down and wrung Harry with sharp twists of his hands, and Harry came with a delicious sensation of giving in.  
  
Malfoy sat back after that, panting open-mouthed. Harry counted three, and squeezed down.  
  
It seemed Malfoy’s orgasm was an utter surprise to him, at least by the way he threw back his head and closed his eyes and sighed through it. Harry watched him, and smiled.   
  
Malfoy lay on him afterwards, and whispered, “That was like nothing else I’ve ever felt.”  
  
“And I’m like no one else you’ve ever had, I hope,” Harry said, learning the small, pale freckles on his shoulders that he looked forward to calling freckles someday, so he could watch Malfoy’s outraged denial.  
  
Malfoy snort-sobbed, or so Harry decided to call the sound that shook him. “How can you _talk_ like that?”  
  
“Because I like it,” Harry said, and smiled at the ceiling. “I think you’ll find that I do a great deal of what I like, all the time.”  
  
Malfoy paused, then heaved himself up and looked into Harry’s face. “You’re not much like the boy you were anymore?” he asked, and touched Harry’s ear as though he was comparing it with the look of that schoolboy’s ear in his memory.  
  
Harry shook his head. “Not much like, Malfoy.”  
  
Malfoy nodded. “Why are you still calling me by my last name?”  
  
“Because you haven’t given me permission to call you Draco.”  
  
“You –want it?” Malfoy stared at him.  
  
Harry answered with a kiss, long and thorough and warm and interested. It was becoming apparent that Malfoy listened better that way, anyway, rather than to words.


	17. In the Case of a Riddle

  
“Well, it must mean _something_.”  
  
Harry kept his eyes closed and his voice lazy and flowing, draping over Draco’s taut muscles like a piece of well-woven cloth. It was becoming painfully evident that Draco liked to withdraw after sex and think of other things, as if that could make up for what he had “done.” It had happened the first time; it was happening now. At least Draco sat on the couch wrapped in a plain robe instead of dressing completely, and even his voice had a softer edge than normal. Harry opened one eye for a quick glimpse of him tilting his head back and shutting his own eyes, although they snapped open in the next moment. Harry hastily shut his own.  
  
“Of course it means _something_ ,” Draco snapped. “The stupid patterns your books are arranged in on your shelves mean _something_. That doesn’t mean we can figure out what it is simply by applying our brains to it.”  
  
“The Oracle chooses the most obvious metaphorical meanings it can,” Harry said, and tilted his head to the side, then his neck, then his arms, then his whole body, before he sat up. “What we have to think of is what a nest can mean and then slowly eliminate the significances that don’t make sense. What?” he added, because this time Draco was gaping at him, and sad to say, Harry didn’t think it had much to do with the long, lean lines of his own body under his robes.  
  
“You know the word _significances_?”   
  
Harry clapped a hand to his forehead and leaned back. “Dear Lord and Master,” he intoned, “someday help me to know what I did to offend Draco Malfoy so that he will forgive me and I can spend the rest of my life worshipping at his feet. Amen.”  
  
Draco flushed again and touched his palm to his forehead, which seemed to be a means of calming his own agitated thoughts. “Bloody hell, Harry, this is new to me, too.”  
  
“I know,” Harry said. “But insulting my intelligence, particularly when you’re _relying_ on it to help you solve this riddle, doesn’t strike me as a particularly smart thing to do.”  
  
Absurdly, Draco relaxed, smiling a little and turning his head as though to look out a window that wasn’t there. “So now that we’ve _both_ insulted each other’s intelligence, we can get back to thinking about the riddle?”  
  
Harry rose to his feet and bent over to kiss the top of Draco’s head. “I’m willing.”  
  
*  
  
“A nest can mean a place where an animal lives, of course.”  
  
Harry nodded solemnly and wrote it down. Draco had insisted on getting fully dressed again, and now he paced back and forth behind Harry’s chair, his arms folded and his head bowed as though he was hunting down the trail of the riddle. Harry sat at his table, the same one where they had spread and studied the letter from Kingsley, and played scribe.  
  
“And it can mean a sheltered, enclosed space.” Draco paused to snort. “If it means that, good luck finding anywhere in the wizarding world that doesn’t qualify.”  
  
“The Forbidden Forest,” Harry said promptly.  
  
“There are plenty of the _other_ kind of nests in there.” Draco turned around to scowl at him. “A nest can be a place something is born.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to respond, and thought better of it. Best to keep the quill moving for now, and hope that Draco would take any flat contradiction of his words better later. He wrote that down and added a question mark against the word “something.”  
  
“Or a nest can be a name for a group of people that’s far too tight and entwined,” Draco said, stopping in his pacing. “I’ve heard the word used about Slytherin, for example. They thought of us as a nest of serpents.”  
  
“So they did,” Harry said, voice neutral and, he had to admit, exquisite with it, and wrote that definition down.  
  
“ _They_ ,” Draco said, swinging on him. “You might as well admit that you thought the same thing, _Gryffindor_ that you were.”  
  
Harry made a show of leaning back and slowly lifting his eyes to Draco’s face, as though oppressed by a great weight. Then he said, “Shall I tell you something? Something I’ve told very few other people?” There were only Ron and Hermione, really, and they had taken the news better than Harry had expected.  
  
“Yes, what?” Draco faced him with head up and taut and trembling, as though daring him to try and escape the accusation of his House identity.  
  
“The Sorting Hat would have placed me in Slytherin if it had its way,” Harry said pleasantly, and watched.  
  
Draco stepped back from him. Then he looked down as though expecting serpents to slide from under Harry’s nails. Harry held up his hands and turned them innocently back and forth, giving Draco the chance to admire them, and, incidentally, remember the pleasure that those hands had brought him.  
  
“No,” Draco said. “You’re lying.”  
  
Harry sighed. “Why would I? It’s true I refused, because two people I trusted had hinted that everything bad happened in Slytherin and I didn’t want to become a wizard like the one who’d murdered my parents. But if the Hat had been more stubborn, or if I hadn’t known anything and just let it put me wherever it wanted, then I would have been your Housemate.”  
  
“You’re lying to make yourself appear a better partner to me,” Draco said, and turned away with his arms folded protectively around his midsection.  
  
Harry tried to keep his expression under control, but he really couldn’t, and the snort worked itself out through his nostrils despite his tight restraint. By the time that Draco had turned around to glare accusingly again, he was laughing, his head bowed, his chuckles turned into helpless chortles against his hands.  
  
“What?” Draco demanded. “You can’t deny that you want to sleep with me more than I want to sleep with you, and you _might_ try that kind of thing to impress me. Come up with a way to convince me that you had the mind of a Slytherin, and I might have to believe you—”  
  
He stopped.  
  
Harry began to applaud softly. Draco glared at him with more red working its way down his face and neck.  
  
“ _There_ speaks the intelligent man I know and love,” Harry said, nodding, and totally ignoring Draco’s whole-body flinch at the last word. “The one who captivated me, the one who’s teaching me daily about my limitations and my preconceptions. You know that I have a Slytherin mind already; I hope I’ve showed you that. And I’m intelligent, and I can detect lies, and I’m magically powerful, and I’m mad about you. Why wouldn’t you keep me near you? The advantage lies with you, as the one less in love. You ought to have seen that by now.”  
  
Draco stood there, head down, but the flush gradually fading from his cheeks. Harry realized that he had no idea what he was thinking. But Draco kept silent, and in the silence, Harry pushed on.  
  
“It’s not like you, or at least the person you like to think of yourself as, to give up the advantage I represent,” Harry said, and pressed a little harder when Draco bowed his head further, so that it was impossible to see his eyes at all. “You’d want to remain in contact with me after the case ended, and here I’m offering you a way to do it. You can keep me on a long leash, not spend every moment with me, and I would accept it. I want to be your lover. It doesn’t mean that we’d spend every waking moment together. I’m offering you the ideal situation. Why _wouldn’t_ you take advantage of it?”  
  
Draco shivered a little and lifted his head. His face was gaunt and sharp, but Harry caught his breath at what he saw in his eyes.  
  
“You’re right,” Draco whispered, and held up one hand as though snatching the declaration from the air. “You’re _right._ I have no reason to be avoiding this as hard as I can, for as long as I can, except that I’m _afraid_. And why am I afraid? That somehow you would manage to betray me harder than anyone else ever has, more _painfully_ than anyone else ever has? So what? I’ve had friends betray me, and contacts, and enemies, and I’ve weathered it. For me to worry about it this much suggests that you already have deeper hooks in my heart than I thought you did.”  
  
Harry found himself smiling. He reached out his hand, and Draco was there to clasp it this time, staring fiercely into his face.  
  
“I like to know myself,” Draco said. “I like to be in control of myself. Lately, I haven’t been. I want to tame the advantage you represent, use it to let me understand myself better, not give it up.”  
  
And he tightened his hands on Harry’s and pulled him close for a kiss.  
  
*  
  
“I don’t see anything that stands out more than anything else.”  
  
Draco’s voice was low and savage as he stared at the piece of parchment on the table, the one that Harry had written all the various meanings of “nest” they could think of down on. Harry rose up and stood behind him, gently massaging Draco’s shoulders. He kissed the nape of his neck and murmured condolences.  
  
“The riddle has to mean _something_ ,” Draco said, leaning against him. He was still a little stiff, but more open and free than he had been with Harry before. Some of that was self-consciousness, Harry knew, pure determination to hold onto the knowledge he had gained of himself, but it led to the same results for Harry, so he still valued it. “You said that, right? That the Oracle didn’t spout meaningless nonsense, it always gave _something_ that could be interpreted?”  
  
“Right.” Harry increased the pressure of his hand rubbing on Draco’s shoulders. The tension flowed away as he touched it.  
  
“The problem is that the riddle’s too wide right now, or what we’ve come up with is.” Draco braced his hands on the table on either side of the parchment and leaned forwards, bringing his nose closer to the writing but incidentally (or perhaps not) also increasing the pressure that Harry could bring to bear on his tension. “We’re thinking of too much. A nest of vampires might have kidnapped my father, but the possibility is low.”  
  
Harry hummed, and went on stroking Draco’s shoulders.  
  
“Are you even _listening_?” Draco twisted around and frowned at him.  
  
Harry smiled at him. “Of course I am. It’s a pleasure to me to listen to your brain rattle along the smooth tracks towards a conclusion. And when you’ve run out of track, I can lay down the final few rails to get you to the goal.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. “You think you’ve thought of something I haven’t thought of?”  
  
“As you pointed out yourself,” Harry said patiently, “I chose to be a Gryffindor and not a Slytherin. I _always_ think I’ve thought of something you haven’t thought of.”  
  
Draco shoved at him, but Harry didn’t choose to be moved, and it just made the both of them sway ridiculously. After a moment, Draco seemed to realize that, and cleared his throat roughly. “Fine. What do you suggest?”  
  
Harry fluttered his eyelashes at him. “Sex?”  
  
“ _Besides_ that.” Now Draco looked as though he were trying not to laugh and was irritated at himself for finding the temptation so hard to resist, which cheered Harry immensely.  
  
“Fine,” Harry said, when they’d had a staring contest for a number of minutes and he knew that Draco wouldn’t let him simply turn away from this. “I think the word ‘nest’ is metaphorical, not real. As you pointed out, vampires could have taken him, but we don’t know that, and we should stay close to what we know.”  
  
Draco shook his head in disgust. “Which is a mysterious letter evidently written by a man who’s in love with my father, and a man who wants my father to destroy his soul.”  
  
“We don’t know it was him Immortal wanted,” Harry corrected him scrupulously. “He never mentioned his name, and I would have sensed a lie.”  
  
Draco started, as he continually did now when Harry brought that up, as if he had to forget about it to be comfortable. Harry leaned back and held his eyes. “Otherwise known as the reason you hired me,” he added.  
  
“Yes, yes.” Draco made brushing-aside motions with his hands. “But do you always need to protect the honor of criminals like this?”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said brightly, and waited. As expected, Draco shoved him.  
  
This time, though, Draco continued on instead of letting himself be distracted. “What do _you_ think the nest means, then? Metaphorical instead of real, fine. We’re not looking for a dragon’s hoard or a vampires’ colony. But what does it mean? A metaphorical nest still leaves us with too many places.”  
  
Harry opened his mouth to answer—  
  
And his brain leaped and spun and came down gently on the right answer, what he was _sure_ was the right answer, the same way he had been sure that the stone in Lucius’s cell concealed the letter, the same way that he had known in the past that a “witness” was lying before he gained this stupid ability.  
  
“I think I know,” he said. “But I need you to answer me a question first, about that charm you used to determine who had written the letter, because I’m not familiar with the magic and the answer to the question will make the difference.”  
  
Draco blinked and studied his face as though looking for some cause of the unaccustomed seriousness in Harry’s tone. Then he nodded slowly.  
  
Harry licked his lips. “Does the charm have anything to say about _willingness?_ That is, could someone have enchanted or forced Kingsley to write that letter? Would the charm show the name of anyone else under those circumstances, or would it always be him as long as his hand physically moved the quill?”  
  
Draco stared. Then he said, “Yes, he could have been enchanted or forced to write it, and the charm would still reveal that it was his handwriting, because it _is_. But then you posit a whole nest—pardon the expression—of enemies out there that we don’t know about, and that perhaps my father’s soul has already been destroyed.”  
  
He was getting steadily more upset, and Harry reached out to gently stroke his hair down and shake his head. “Sorry for upsetting you. What I meant was—I think I might know someone who would have reason to force Kingsley to write that letter, perhaps with the Imperius Curse, and still take your father away. And the nest idea makes sense with that person, as well.”  
  
Draco leaned forwards. “Who?”  
  
Harry met his eyes again. “Your mother.”  
  
Draco looked as though someone had hit him across the face. It gave Harry an excuse to put his arms around Draco again and hold him, but he found it less satisfying than he would have if he hadn’t been the one to make Draco look like that.  
  
“She couldn’t,” Draco whispered. “She knows—she’s been on her own for years, only coming home sometimes, and she _knows_ the risk it would be to get my father out of Azkaban. She wouldn’t do it.”  
  
“What if she found out about the threat that Immortal represents, and leaped to the same conclusion we did, that they wanted your father for his body, to bring back the Dark Lord?” Harry shook his head. “Not unreasonable, when we straight there ourselves. And the nest idea—the nest is a place where you’re born, yeah, but it can also be a home. We talk about birds having nests, not just young birds. Malfoy Manor.”  
  
It was almost cute to see the way that Draco’s brain was scrambling to keep up. Well, Harry was sure that there were things Draco could think and talk about that would leave Harry dazed in much the same way. Potions theory, for example. Harry would invite him to talk about some of them when this case was over, and then Harry would lean back and listen to him in love and awe.  
  
 _Is it love?  
  
Yes, it is._  
  
The certainty settled in Harry’s chest, a ballast of contentment, at the same moment as Draco said, “She still wouldn’t take the risk. And it _would_ be a risk to use the Imperius Curse on the Minister and force him to go to Azkaban, take out a prisoner, and then use a Memory Charm on his own guards.”  
  
“Maybe she did it some other way, then,” Harry said quietly. “But that’s the best idea I can come up with.” He was also sure that he was right, but it was hard enough to explain his “hunts” to other Aurors and give them the right idea, let alone to someone like Draco, who had little idea of what Auror work entailed. Harry would explain it later if he really wanted to hear, though.  
  
“All right,” Draco whispered. “We should—if we just go to the Manor and confront her, then she’ll probably face us down, and then move him. We need to go about this subtly.”  
  
Harry lounged back and smiled at him. “That’s where you come in.”  
  
As he had known would happen, that made Draco’s eyes brighten and his face relax as he found something new to work towards. Harry knew that about him, that he was happiest when he had something to _do_.  
  
As was Harry, for that matter.  
  
 _This really is a match made in heaven. Or, well, hell for some people,_ he added conscientiously, because he tried never to neglect the perspective of his enemies.


	18. Subtlety, Thy Name Is Draco

  
“I think this is the best course to take.”  
  
“Hmmm?” Harry had to admit that he was admiring the shape of Draco’s face, and especially the way his lips moved, instead of listening to his words. He was sure that Draco would come up with a good plan anyway, since he had attacked the suggestion that he be the one to plan this with admirable vigor.  
  
“I _said_ ,” Draco muttered, and then paused and studied him. “I realize that I may not give this impression,” he added, “but I will be content with some worship _once_ in a while. Not all the time. Listen to what I’m saying.”  
  
Harry shook himself, sat up on the couch, and did so. They had spent last night in Harry’s bed, although only sleeping instead of fucking. Harry had to admit that it was nice to watch Draco’s face relax, for once, and see him fall asleep inside the circle of Harry’s arms instead of pulling away as usual, as if the sex was dirty.  
  
Except Draco was glaring at him right now, and Harry had the distinct feeling that he’d been disobeying instructions to pay attention to his words again. Harry cleared his throat. “Merlin, but you’re distracting.”  
  
“Not right now,” Draco said, and it was true that he was dressed in an old robe and his hair was mussed and he was lounging on the other side of the couch in a way that might have seemed inappropriate to a Potions genius and the center of Harry Potter’s life right at the moment. Harry found him adorable anyway.  
  
“No, really,” Draco said a moment later, and snapped his fingers in front of Harry’s nose, causing him to flinch and straighten. “I know it’s hard for you to be serious, but that’s something I require in a lover sometimes, too.”  
  
Privately, Harry thought that was because Draco had never experienced the joy of a lover who could make him laugh, but he knew better than to say so. Draco wanted him to be serious, so he could. He nodded and leaned his elbows on top of his knees. “All right. What is your plan, and do I need to play any part in it?”  
  
Draco eyed him a moment as though unable to believe he finally had Harry’s attention, but Harry knew how to look sober and alert from endless boring meetings with Kingsley. Draco grudgingly nodded and unfolded the parchment he held.  
  
“I can imitate my father’s hand well enough,” he said. “I needed to be able to, to get some money out of the vaults that the Ministry tried to freeze.” Harry opened his mouth, but closed it again when a sharp look from Draco told him that Draco wasn’t about to go into that story right now. “I’m going to write to my mother and tell her I’m not worried about his escape from Azkaban anymore, since I’ve received a letter from him saying that he’s well and doesn’t intend to interfere in my life.”  
  
Harry blinked. “Won’t she just go and ask him, and he’ll deny ever writing a letter?”  
  
Draco smiled sadly as he folded up the letter. “My family doesn’t trust each other anymore, Harry.” It was one of the few times he had ever said the name without a sneer behind it, and Harry wanted to pause and soak it up, but Draco’s narrowed eyes warned him to keep his mind going. “My mother would have told me that she planned to free my father from Azkaban, otherwise. Or at least hinted that she was afraid of the danger to his soul, so that I could help her. She didn’t. Nor will she ask him outright if he wrote a letter. She doesn’t have your gift for spotting lies.”  
  
Harry nodded. The plan sounded a bit daft to him, but Draco was the one who knew his parents.  
  
“And in the meantime,” Draco said softly, “she’ll start hunting for the break in her security, for the way that he got the letter past her defenses, or who might have told me where he was. And that will distract her.”  
  
“What will we do in the meantime?” Harry leaned forwards, not trying to conceal the hunting quiver in his veins. It affected Draco, if the way his eyes glinted for a moment was any indication.  
  
“I will keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t go anywhere where she might learn too much,” Draco said, with a curl of his lip that made Harry _not_ want to inquire into the details. He had made a discovery which shocked him, that not everything about Draco was adorable. “And you’ll invade the Manor.”  
  
Harry choked a little, though more because he hadn’t realized Draco had that much faith in him than because he thought it was a bad plan. “What about the wards? I know there are some wards on the place that only recognize a blood relative.”  
  
Draco started to answer, but frowned instead. “How did you learn _that_?”  
  
“Er,” Harry said, and blushed for the first time from something other than excitement. It looked as though Draco was about to learn the same non-adorable facts about him. “I learned it from some of the secrets I paid people to uncover about your family.”  
  
“You paid them why?” Draco sat up, and one could have mistaken him for an Auror conducting an interrogation if he was wearing a pair of scarlet robes.  
  
Harry swallowed. “Because I thought you might still be hiding Dark artifacts there, and I wanted to be prepared in case we ever had to make a raid,” he said. But he ended up bowing his head with shame, because Draco’s gaze cut through him, and if Draco ever found out the truth, Harry would end up bowing his head in shame _anyway_. “No, that’s not the truth. Not _we_. I thought you might be hiding Dark artifacts, and I paid the experts and undertook the extra research myself. The other Aurors and Kingsley thought I was being foolish. Most people could accept that you were innocent after the trials ended.”  
  
“I thought you did, as well.” Draco was still staring at him. “You spoke up for us enough at the trials. Why do that if you thought there was a chance that we might not be innocent?”  
  
Harry winced again. This was something he hadn’t even thought about when he was pursuing Draco, but he should have. Draco was more likely to decide that things he’d done in the past made him not worth having as a lover, rather than things that Harry had done in the course of this case. “I, um. I thought you were innocent of the charges of being a Death Eater willingly, and all that. Not your father,” he had to add. “Even though most of it was in the first war and not the second.”  
  
Draco still waited for an answer, his eyes said far too clearly, so Harry swallowed noisily and pushed on. “But I thought you might not be innocent of other things,” he admitted. “Every time I thought about it, thought about dropping the investigation, I would think of the way that you _did_ turn out to be up to something in sixth year, and I would continue the research.”  
  
“ _Research_.” Draco shook his head. “A nice word for spying. How much did that have to do with your eagerness to have me around when I showed up to hire you?”  
  
Harry blinked. “Nothing. I hadn’t thought you might be hiding Dark artifacts in at least a year when you hired me.”  
  
“You say that,” Draco said, with a weary, halting breath. “But how can I trust you? I know, I know, I should have asked you about grudges you held in the past before I became involved with you,” he added, holding up his hand, although that hadn’t been at all what Harry was thinking. “I didn’t think to, and that’s on my head. But I’ll have honest answers now.”  
  
Harry squirmed in his seat. Draco had turned the couch into a magistrate’s throne, far more impressive than it had been to Harry the times that he’d stood before the Wizengamot to testify. “I’m still willing to take Veritaserum,” he said.  
  
“I’ll take you up on that offer,” Draco said, and waved his wand. Harry couldn’t hear the incantation, which he kept nonverbal, but the effect was clear enough when a small vial of the potion soared out of the robes Draco had left hanging on a chair. He held it up and turned it back and forth, letting Harry see the clear liquid.  
  
Harry nodded.  
  
Now, of all times, Draco blinked, as though he had expected Harry to withdraw his offer at the last second. Harry reckoned he couldn’t blame him for being surprised by that, when he had been less than agreeably surprised by a few other things Harry had done tonight. But he remained still as Draco got up and walked hesitantly around the couch towards him.  
  
Harry leaned back and opened his mouth. He had thought of adopting a more formal pose, sitting up and keeping his hands down, but Draco knew him—at least a little—by now. That kind of thing would make him distrust Harry faster than all the rest.  
  
And Harry didn’t _want_ to be distrusted. Maybe it was natural that Draco should do so, but Harry knew what he wanted, and distrust wasn’t romantic.  
  
Draco paused again, then tipped three drops into his mouth. He had precise control of the vial, Harry thought, and found a new thing to admire, that even when he’d been confronted by a revelation that was unplanned and seemed to have upset him, Draco’s hands were steady.  
  
Then the Veritaserum took over. Harry could feel his eyes crossing, then closing, but the sensation was distant from him. His skin seemed to be someone else’s, someone he was connected to magically. His breathing slowed, and his voice came out slow and halting when Draco asked him a question.  
  
“Harry James Potter.” Oh, the question must have been his name.  
  
It seemed Draco didn’t know what to ask next, or else the usual effects Veritaserum had on Harry were even worse than usual and he didn’t hear it as a separate thing. He heard Draco fluttering around him, and managed to open his eyes.  
  
Draco froze when he did, then shook his head and straightened up. It was the kind of attitude he probably assumed when he wanted to convince someone else he wasn’t afraid of them, Harry thought. “What was your object in letting me hire you?” Draco asked sternly.  
  
“I wanted to go with you when I saw you,” Harry replied, in that same dull, tired voice. “And I wanted to have the contact information you promised me.”  
  
Draco prowled back and forth in front of him. “When did you give up spying on me?”  
  
“Eighteen months ago.”  
  
Draco cast a glance at the vial that it took Harry a long moment to interpret, with his brain as weary as it was. When he understood, he wanted to protest, to assure Draco that of course he had brewed the potion perfectly. Wasn’t he the best Potions master there ever had been, the best Harry had seen, except maybe Snape, whose skills weren’t on display in the classroom much? But Veritaserum didn’t encourage responding except when someone asked you a direct question, so Harry stayed silent.  
  
Finally, Draco said, “I find that extremely difficult to believe. Why would you give up spying on me when you were so convinced that my family was hiding Dark artifacts?” He spun on Harry and nodded several times as though delighted at finding an argument that would be proof against anything Harry could say.  
  
“Because I came closer and closer to you, and learned more, and realized that it probably wasn’t true.” Harry’s voice still sounded dull and dead to his own ears, but it could make Draco react, at least, from the way he stepped back with his eyes wide, and that was _very_ satisfying. “I learned that you had tried to stay out of trouble since the war, and I believed that you had. It made it stupid for me to go on thinking you were Dark, and I had been wrong once before about you, in sixth year.”  
  
“You were _right_ about me in sixth year,” Draco snapped. “I was up to something, remember?”  
  
“But not for the reasons I thought you were,” Harry said. “Everything was more complicated than I thought it was. That seemed to be happening again. And I was taking up time and money doing it, and I hadn’t uncovered anything, and Kingsley probably would have started noticing what I was doing soon. All of those were good enough reasons not to continue.”  
  
Draco shook his head. His eyes were brilliant, his lips set. “But you must have suspected something. You wanted to continue spying on me when I offered to hire you.”  
  
“I wanted to go with you when I saw you. And I wanted to have the contact information—”  
  
“Yes, yes, that’s what you said _before_!” Draco snapped, and then fell silent and shut his eyes.  
  
Harry watched him. Draco looked adorable even like this, when he knew that his thoughts were moving much more slowly than before because of the Veritaserum in his system. Draco with his head bowed, his mind catching up with the revelation that Harry _must_ be telling the truth because of what he had said before, was beautiful. Draco when he turned around and faced Harry like someone going to his doom in front of the Dark Lord was even better.  
  
“Fine,” Draco said, his voice stretched to snapping point. “Let’s accept that I do think you’re telling the truth.” Harry would have opened his mouth to comment that Draco should accept it because it was _his_ Veritaserum, but that hadn’t been a direct question, and he stayed silent. “But that means that I want to know something else.” He moved in until he was leaning directly in front of Harry, his nose only a few centimeters away. “What do you feel about me?”  
  
 _An easy question._ Harry could feel the relief washing through him, and smiled. Draco took a step back at the smile, and then folded his arms and looked furious with himself. Harry could practically feel his brain racing with indignation that he had been made to look like a coward.  
  
The understanding spilled out into his voice. “I like you because I know you so well,” Harry said. “I’m amused by you because I know you so well, too. I like the way you look. You’re so fit. You’re trying to make your own life, and so many people never do that. You could even say that I didn’t do it for myself, since I became an Auror the way so many people expected.” He paused to take a breath. Draco stood there with his face unreadable, or trying for it. The way a muscle twitched in his cheek gave him away to an observer as experienced as Harry.  
  
“I like you,” Harry finished quietly. “For standing up, and being who you are, and continuing with me even though you’re scared, and even for the way that you forced me to take Veritaserum before you would trust me. You need the ultimate proof. That’s fine. I want to give it. I want to give you as much as you’ll allow me. You can talk to me all you like and think about it, but you’ll never drive me away.”  
  
Draco made a harsh sound that concerned Harry for his breathing, but then he was running, pelting across the room, towards what Harry thought was the door. Harry wondered how long he would have to wait for the Veritsaerum to wear off before he could go hunting. He wouldn’t do it while still under the potion, in case he met someone who would ask him an innocent question and the answer that came out was prejudicial to Draco’s interests.  
  
But Draco came back, fumbling hastily, with a potion that gurgled and sloshed in its container, and Harry understood when Draco held the vial to his lips and encouraged him to drink. It was an antidote to the Veritaserum. Harry swallowed obediently, and coughed a little as the feeling of normality returned to him, as he exhaled and inhaled and his skin felt once more like his own.  
  
Draco was mumbling something rapidly, and Harry had to strain his ears to listen. “I’ll never doubt you again. You didn’t—you came through that, and you put up with it, and you are loyal in the way you said you were—”  
  
Harry took Draco’s hand and held it to his lips, in silence. This was the response to the declaration he had made, then, to both declarations, really, and it was more than enough.


	19. A Way Into the Manor

  
“Mother, thank you for meeting with me.”  
  
Harry smiled as he watched from behind the curtain stretched across the private room’s back wall. He wouldn’t have thought that any of the restaurants in Diagon Alley _had_ private back rooms, but that only proved, as Draco had told him, that he wasn’t used to using his money. Draco only had to offer a few cold stares, a few more dropped words about certain connections he had, and some more Galleons, and he had permission not only to use the back room to meet his mother, but for Harry to stand behind the curtain. The restaurant owner’s expression had said all too openly that he didn’t _want_ to know what was going on.  
  
“Draco. Thank you for setting up the meeting.”  
  
Empty courtesies seemed to be the order of the day, Harry thought, watching Narcissa Malfoy as she made a little bow to her son. She was taller than he’d remembered—not that he’d ever seen her very close for very long—and the white cloak she wore billowed behind her. Draco stepped up, took it, drew out her chair, and draped the cloak over the back. Narcissa took it and tilted her head back to watch him with a cool expression.  
  
 _If I met her in the course of a case, she wouldn’t look guilty,_ Harry decided wisely. _Which would be all the more reason to concentrate on her as a suspect, of course._  
  
“Of course,” Draco said, and leaned back behind the table, his knee cocked up to touch the underside, his smile wise and worldly. “You know what this is about, Mother, don’t you?”  
  
“I could scarcely avoid knowing, when you told me about the letter you received,” Narcissa said, and held Draco’s eyes. She gave him no more help, but glanced at the list of prices and items floating in magically-written letters above the table, and tapped her wand against what Harry knew was one of the more expensive dishes. The letters flashed once, and then returned to what looked like normal.  
  
“Yes, well.” Draco dropped his head. “I just—Mother, I just want to know he’s safe and happy. That’s _all_. If you’re in contact with him, will you tell him that, for me?”  
  
Harry saw the way Narcissa’s hand paused as if arrested by someone catching her wrist. Her eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction, and she shook her had a little. “Draco, you know that I am not in contact with your father. The Ministry permits one visit a month to Azkaban, and since he disappeared, I do not have even that.”  
  
Harry sighed as the crimson corona around Narcissa’s head flamed into being on her first sentence, diminished on the words about how often the Ministry permitted her to visit her husband, and flared up again when she made her statement about being in contact with Lucius. They had agreed on this variation of Draco’s initial plan because that way, Harry could clearly make sure Narcissa was lying.  
  
She was. They had found the suspect behind Lucius’s disappearance.  
  
Harry waved his wand, causing a small piece of dust to rise from the base of the curtain and drift onto Draco’s shoulder. Draco uttered a small exclamation and rubbed it off his shirt. “I shall have to have a word with Master Perkins about the condition of his room,” he murmured, and touched his own wand to some letters in the list.   
  
The dust was their agreed-upon signal if Narcissa lied. Harry could make out the way Draco’s shoulders slumped for a moment, and then the way he sat up, leaning in, focusing on his mother as though his own gaze could tell him what the lies behind her façade were.  
  
It was silly of him to do that, when he had Harry as a reliable lie detector and Harry would handle all the violence Draco wanted him to. But like ninety percent of the things about Draco, it was adorable anyway.  
  
 _It’s the ten percent that will probably cause most of the excitement in our relationship._  
  
Harry smiled, but forced himself to pay attention to Draco’s response to his mother. They still hadn’t completely solved the mystery, and wouldn’t until Lucius was safely back in Azkaban, or at least in Draco’s hands.  
  
“All right,” Draco said, in a subdued tone, and folded his hands on top of the table. “I just—I worry about him. I know he said he was safe in my letter, but I worry.”  
  
Not even the flash of a lie around his head, because he had got by with calling the letter “my letter.” Harry held back the temptation to chuckle. Narcissa had no reason to suspect he was here, but she wasn’t deaf.  
  
Besides, Draco folding his hands on top of the table had been a signal. He would keep his mother occupied here while Harry went to the Manor and tried to figure out a way inside to the place where she was keeping Lucius hidden—a modification of the original plan that Harry had proposed when Draco had asked him to spy on the conversation between Draco and Narcissa.  
  
That only left extracting himself from the curtain, but Harry had worked as a spy inside Dark wizards’ lairs before, and he was more skilled at this than most of his enemies would have acknowledged. He eased sideways, centimeter by centimeter, and listened to Narcissa’s conversation all the while. If she sounded distracted or said something that made red light shine through the curtain, then he would know at once.  
  
 _Another advantage of this curse that the Unspeakables did not mean to be an advantage._  
  
Right now, Narcissa was murmuring commonplaces about how much she missed Lucius and how much it damaged a pure-blood family to have the head of it in prison. Harry listened to the tone and watched for red light, and emerged from the curtain under a Disillusionment Charm without hearing or seeing anything incriminating. He shook his head. Narcissa was subtle, and dangerous, with the way that she had managed to convince Kingsley to act for her, but she wasn’t invincible. He needed to stop acting as if she was.  
  
He felt Draco’s eyes on his back as he moved towards the door, waiting patiently until it opened and the dishes Draco and Narcissa had ordered floated inside. Then he slipped out and let the door fall to noiselessly behind him.  
  
If he could have, he would have made a reassuring gesture to Draco, but he was on his way, and Draco would have to survive on his own. He could _probably_ do that. He had done it for more than twenty years without Harry’s help, after all, and sometimes with his active opposition.  
  
 _Probably._  
  
Harry walked to a place where not many people stood and then Apparated, the sight of Malfoy Manor blazing clear in his mind from the investigations of it he had done last year.  
  
*  
  
The gates of the Manor still shimmered behind the wards that Harry’s spies had told him existed, wards that would keep anyone out who wasn’t of the blood, unless someone who _was_ invited them willingly. Harry sighed. They would see if the precaution he and Draco had devised to get him past them worked or not.  
  
He dug into his pocket while watching all around him. Narcissa might have human guards, or house-elves, keeping an eye on the house and especially reporting all visitors who came near it.  
  
But the only living beings he saw were the inevitable white peacocks, stalking back and forth with jerks of their long necks. Harry smiled and watched them as he held out the object Draco had enchanted, a small mirror, towards the wards.  
  
Harry had never heard of such a thing, but Draco had explained that an enchantment placed in a mirror, if it was strong enough and the glass had a certain _other_ spell placed on it, would retain the feeling of a being’s presence. It was a fact known and used in Potions theory to enable two Potions masters to work on sensitive concoctions, apparently, which would otherwise blow up at the feeling of a foreign magical signature. Draco’s idea was that enchanting the mirror with the feeling of his presence would convince the Malfoy wards that a Malfoy blood heir stood there.  
  
For long moments, the wards simply shimmered, not hostile as long as Harry didn’t come closer than this to them, and then there was a small clicking noise and they dissolved. Harry stepped up as the gates swung inwards, but kept the mirror held in front of him. He was sure there were other wards along the way, and the mirror might help him with them.  
  
The peacocks turned their heads to stare at him, and then turned away again. Harry shook his head at them. “Be that way, if you want to,” he muttered, and kept walking.  
  
The path wound slowly up to the Manor doors, and several times, Harry sensed something watching him, only to dissolve when he turned the mirror in its direction. Yes, Draco’s idea had worked, and it had been a good one.  
  
 _But does Draco ever have wrong ideas about anything other than me and sex?_  
  
Harry smiled. He had to admit that he found it hard to think of any.  
  
He reached the front door, and lowered the mirror. The wards didn’t immediately lash out and destroy him. That made it a good bet that his informers had been accurate and the wards here didn’t link to the blood family. Harry had been surprised when he first learned that, but when he had thought about it more later, the Malfoys probably depended on the blood wards to keep someone from sneaking onto the grounds, not to destroy visitors they would have had to give permission to approach their front door.  
  
 _Most people need permission. But I’m not most people._  
  
With a feeling of well-being like gold in his head, Harry cast the spell he had invented some time ago. The magic sang along his veins, and made his hands glow, in this case an obscured yellow through the black marks on the palms that the artifact had left. Harry hesitated. He hadn’t thought of what the artifact’s lingering magic might do to his spell.  
  
But he had come this far, and it would be cowardly not to at least test. He reached out and laid his hands on the door.  
  
The wards snapped at him, stung and leaped and came down like fleet-footed hawks—and were counteracted by the spell that coursed through him, one that rendered any bit of skin which his blood ran beneath invulnerable to harm from defensive magic. Harry’s hair stood on end, and his palms became a bit more singed than he had thought they would. Of course, he had never dealt with wards as powerful as this before, mostly only the hasty ones that a Dark wizard threw up in front of a lair they intended to come back to later.  
  
These wards assaulted him again and again, and his eyes watered and he was sneezing before they were done. But at last they fell dead, cut through, and Harry swung open the door and stepped inside.   
  
He wasn’t worried about the security of the rest of the Manor. The hole in the wards only covered the front door, and he was sure that house-elves would repair them as soon as he left.  
  
For now, the elves only cowered in the corner, staring at him, as Draco had said they would. They were under orders to defend their owners’ property and person, but Harry didn’t intend to attack either of those.  
  
He laid his wand on his stinging palm and closed his eyes. “ _Point Me_ Lucius Malfoy,” he whispered.  
  
Once again, the magic leaped through him as his spell had done. Harry felt it ruffle his hair, and snorted a little. A lot of that was already standing out from his head because of the lightning-like effect of the wards. He suspected he _would_ look a sight by the time he was done.  
  
But needs must, when your lover’s mother had stolen his father, hidden him somewhere, and then tried to blame your boss for it.  
  
The wand aimed up the stairs. Harry went up lightly, making sure not to hit or chip anything. The house-elves would rouse up then, and he didn’t want to have them to contend with, when he was so close to getting away with it cleanly.  
  
The wand tugged him sideways, and Harry followed. It seemed he was speeding past doors, all of them closed, and he shook his head a little. Narcissa hadn’t taken the trouble to hide her husband that Harry would have expected, but without a spell—without knowing that Lucius was here, which most people wouldn’t have suspected—then you could search in all the vast rooms for months without a clue.  
  
But the spell was a common one, which _did_ make Harry wonder how Narcissa had planned to hide Lucius if someone suspected and forced an entrance. Or had she relied on the wards to give her enough time?  
  
Finally, the wand brought him to a halt in front of what looked like an ordinary stretch of stone in the Manor’s walls. Harry studied it thoughtfully, and smiled when he saw signs of fresh construction. He nodded. Narcissa had indeed hidden the room, although again she seemed to have taken a chance relying on the wards.  
  
He took a step back and closed his eyes. He could have used the ward-defeating spell again, or simply tried to break it down, but for the same concerns about the house-elves. Besides, he thought there was a simpler solution here.   
  
“Lucius?” he called.  
  
There was utter silence for a long moment, but Harry was familiar with that kind. It came from someone too stunned to make noise, rather than no one being there. He waited, smiling a little, turning his wand over and over in his fingers.  
  
Then the stone grated and moved, turning smoothly on hinges Harry hadn’t suspected were there. The door opened out into the corridor, revealing a small room beyond with white marble walls and a roaring fire. That made sense, Harry reckoned. Most Azkaban prisoners spent some time being cold when they came out of the prison.  
  
Lucius leaned out into the corridor, and stared at him. Then he said, “How can you be here, Harry Potter?”  
  
Harry saw no reason not to tell the truth. Lucius hadn’t lied to him yet, after all. “Your son hired me to help him find you.”  
  
Lucius blinked, and blinked some more. Finally, he muttered, “But he wouldn’t have needed to. Narcissa _said_ she would tell him, as soon as the Ministry stopped suspecting that he had something to do with it.”  
  
“I don’t think the Ministry ever suspected that, except the way they would suspect any member of your family might have broken you free,” Harry said gently. “Suspicion is—elsewhere, right now.” He wasn’t sure this was the time to get into conclusions about the people who might have wanted to destroy Lucius’s soul. “Somehow, your wife broke you free, and she’s kept you concealed from Draco since. Draco really wanted to find you, and he was afraid you might be dead. But he didn’t know. I was the one who figured that out,” he added helpfully. He reckoned it couldn’t be a stupid thing, to let Draco’s family know how clever he was. Maybe Lucius would throw his weight behind a more permanent connection.  
  
“She used an Imperius Curse on Shacklebolt,” Lucius murmured, shaking his head. “She told me that. But—she also told me she was rescuing me from a worse fate.” He swallowed. He looked gaunt, and Harry thought his hair would have been more shocking if it hadn’t been so near white already, absorbing most of the pale color it had turned. “Are you saying that wasn’t true? That Narcissa would have kept me concealed from Draco forever if she could?”  
  
Harry set his back. Lucius had no wand that he could see, and Harry was confident of taking him if he attacked. Again, he might as well tell the truth. “Draco wanted you to go back to Azkaban so that he could control his own life. Somehow, he didn’t seem too fond of having you as the head of the family again.”  
  
Lucius shook his head immediately. “I would never have tried that. Legally and otherwise, he’s his own man now.”  
  
His voice rang with truth, and the space around his head was clear of crimson. Harry nibbled his lip indecisively and stared at him. Then he said, “But can you deny the Ministry will never stop searching for you, as long as you’re free? And they’ll keep a watch over Draco, too, so he can’t do what he wants. The safest place for you to secure Draco’s future is in a cell.”  
  
Lucius sighed. “I did not say my wife’s solution was perfect. But I would rather be free than not, and while I am sorry for Draco’s fears—I don’t plan to interfere in his life, I thought he knew that—I will not go back to Azkaban.”  
  
Harry studied him thoughtfully. Despite what Draco had said, he probably _would_ prefer that his father be free, if there was a way to avoid consequences for himself.  
  
And Harry could see a lot of good in getting Draco’s father free, and in getting the Ministry to leave him alone. Good in Draco’s gratitude, if nothing else.  
  
Which just meant Harry had to come up with a brilliant solution that would content everyone all around, and keep the Ministry from looking for Lucius, too.  
  
Then Harry had it, and he smiled.   
  
_I really am too good._


	20. For the Greater Good

  
“I don’t _think_ we would have to involve your wife.”  
  
Harry leaned back and took a small sip of the butterbeer that Lucius had ordered the house-elves to provide for him. He had offered something stronger, but Harry didn’t think that was a good idea, especially with all the thinking he’d had to do. He and Lucius had discussed things, but Lucius had contributed nothing except objections. He kept staring at Harry and shaking his head a little, as though he didn’t understand where this incredible apparition with the power to save his life had come from.  
  
Harry didn’t mind. After all, people had stared at him in awe and wonder for much worse reasons.  
  
“But there’s no reason why she would not _ask_ ,” Lucius protested now. “If the Ministry suddenly stopped searching for me, then she would want to know why.”  
  
Harry snorted. “She already thinks she pulled off the smartest escape plan the world has ever seen.” Lucius had explained to him exactly how Narcissa’s plan had worked, how she had used the Imperius Curse to make Kingsley write those letters—although she had dictated the words that went into them—and walk onto the island and retrieve Lucius. Then a Memory Charm had taken care of any possibility that Kingsley would remember and accuse Narcissa when she removed the Curse. Simple, really, at least for someone willing to use Unforgivables. “She thinks they would never suspect her, never search for you here, or she would have taken stronger precautions to keep someone like me out.”  
  
“How did you get in?”  
  
Harry didn’t want to reveal Draco’s mirror trick, and he wasn’t sure that he could have, anyway; he had understood the magical theory behind the mirror when Draco explained it, but he wouldn’t remember all the names of the laws and exceptions. He smiled modestly instead, which made Lucius look even more awed, and said, “There is a way to make the Ministry stop searching for you and not suspect your family, either, and it’s the one I already explained to you. We use the readymade suspects that chance provided for us.”  
  
“You’re willing to lie to the Minister for me,” said Lucius. “And to let my wife get away with using an Unforgivable Curse.”  
  
“I used the same one, during the war, and got away with it,” Harry said quietly. “I _do_ want to make sure that she won’t use it again, in pursuit of a worse purpose. If there’s any chance that she does, I’d expect you to report it to me.”  
  
“Why should I?” Lucius put his head up and tried to look intimidating, but it was a little hard when he was wrapped in a thick, warm robe and huddling towards the roaring fire in his hidden room. “What do I owe you?”  
  
“Keeping your arse out of prison permanently, instead of just for a little while,” Harry said. “You know her better than I do. Do you think Narcissa had any long-term plan? Or would she just have kept you concealed in the Manor until she wasn’t paranoid anymore? Which could take a long time.”  
  
Lucius thought about it, then sighed. “You have a point,” he said, without dwelling on it, which actually cheered Harry up. Awe of Harry or not, it was plain that his time in Azkaban hadn’t killed Lucius’s Malfoy pride. “But my son will know.”  
  
“He has to,” Harry said. “Just like he has to know that you don’t actually plan to take his life away and put him under permanent suspicion from the Ministry. And that’s the main reason I’m doing this, really. It’s not for you, although I do feel sorry for you being caught up as an innocent victim in all this. It’s for Draco. I want him to be happy.”  
  
Lucius stared at him in silence, nursing his glass of mulled wine. Then he said, “I do not know whether to be glad or sorry for Draco that he met you. I think you would do more, and worse, for him than Narcissa would for me.”  
  
“I would do much more, and much worse,” Harry said gently. “I never found someone, before, who needed me in all the ways he does, and who I was prepared to sacrifice so much for. I would have sacrificed for my friends if they needed me that much, but they don’t. Draco does.”  
  
Lucius looked away and stared into the fire as though that would afford him the reassurance that nothing else could, his hands trembling on his mug. “I hope that Draco never asks you to do anything that could destroy him,” he muttered.  
  
Harry laughed merrily. “I would know that ahead of time, and I would stop him.”  
  
Lucius watched him now with his head on one side and an expression that wanted to be wise on his face. Harry thought he had lost too much in Azkaban to really be wise, though. Perhaps when he’d recovered more and gained back his scattered wits. “Draco is stronger than you know. You might end up with his hand on your reins, and not the other way around.”  
  
Harry blinked for a moment, wondering how Lucius could have misunderstood everything so much, and then nodded as he grasped it. “You think that Draco and I aren’t going to have an equal relationship,” he said, “but we are. There isn’t going to be someone’s hand on the reins. We’ll guide each other together.”  
  
Lucius sighed and shook his head dubiously. Harry smiled back. He was used to people doubting him, until he did something remarkable and showed them they didn’t have to. So it was easy to forgive Lucius his doubts now. He would teach him better when he had the plan well in hand and the Ministry wasn’t hunting Lucius anymore.  
  
He swallowed the last of his butterbeer and stood. “Shall we get going?”  
  
*  
  
“Where have you _been_?”  
  
Harry kept his back turned for a second as he took off his cloak and hung it up on the peg near his door. Partially, he just wanted to keep Draco fussing for a moment more, and _bask_ in the fussing, something he wouldn’t get to do often, knowing Draco. Partially, he wanted to have a chance to work the grin at the fussing itself off his face.  
  
Then he turned around and widened his eyes innocently. “What? Did something happen?”  
  
“You weren’t at the Apparition point when you should have been.” Draco stalked towards him, then seemed to decide touching Harry would distract him right now and halted a safe distance away, glaring at him. “Do you _know_ what I was imagining had happened to you?”  
  
“Tell me,” Harry said. “Unless it’s disgusting and not exciting, in which case, don’t bother.” He brushed past Draco casually and headed for the kitchen. He’d had plenty to drink at the Manor, but Lucius hadn’t thought to offer him food.  
  
Draco caught his shoulder and spun him around. Harry tossed his head back, and let himself bask, too, in the pure delight that flooded him when Draco touched him. His shoulders quivered, and his pulse beat, and he wanted to reach out and gather Draco close when he did that. But he had the feeling Draco might not understand.  
  
Draco paused, staring at him. Then he said, “You’re insufferable.” But his hand moved further down Harry’s arm, and clasped his hand.  
  
Harry nodded, lifting his head. “Your father is in the Manor. Your mother hadn’t hidden him all that well. I think that she counted on the wards to stop anyone before they got that far, or at least warn her so she could move him to a better location. And in the meantime, we had a nice chat. Thanks for keeping your mother occupied for so long. We wouldn’t have been able to do that otherwise.” He moved towards the kitchen again, although he allowed Draco to hold his hand and so expected the sudden tug backwards.  
  
“You had a _chat_?” Draco was staring at him, and the expression of wonder on his face was so precious that Harry reached up and cradled his cheeks. Draco batted his hands away, but didn’t move back, which might have been the only thing he could have done to teach Harry a lesson. “What about?”  
  
“About the best way to keep him out of Azkaban while making sure the Ministry has no reason to think that you or your mother are responsible,” Harry said tranquilly. “I came up with the plan, of course. He told me why it wouldn’t work. And he agreed to order the house-elves not to tell Narcissa I was there, so he did make some contributions.”  
  
Draco swallowed loudly. “Did he look—well?”  
  
Harry softened, and moved closer. “He was fine. Your mother is taking excellent care of him. He doesn’t want to go back to prison, understandably, but he swears that your life and your money are yours, Draco. He isn’t going to try to take control again.”  
  
Draco stood there with his eyes opening and shutting, as though he was struggling against a strong wind. Harry put his hands on either side of Draco’s cheeks, stroking gently, and Draco shuddered and bowed his head, his shoulders hunching as though to hold back another blast of that wind.  
  
“I _want_ to believe him,” he whispered. “I think I could, if I could see him face-to-face. But how do I know this exhaustion of his is going to last forever? How do I know he won’t feel better in a few months and insist on taking control of the family back?”  
  
“He wouldn’t do that,” Harry said soothingly, running his hands up and down the tightly clenched muscles in Draco’s back and wishing there was another way to make him feel better.  
  
Draco opened his eye and regarded Harry for a second. “And you think that you can predict him, when you never knew him well in the first place?”  
  
“ _I_ think,” Harry said firmly, “that I’m going to prevent him from doing anything of the kind, and he knows it. He told me that it frightened him, how devoted I was to you. So whether you ever knew anything about what he was planning or not, I would find out. And I would stop him from doing it.”  
  
Draco took a step back, gaping at him. Then he said, quite sharply, “Devotion or not, I don’t want you killing my father.”  
  
Harry laughed. “Did I kill Flint? Did I kill Corinna? No. I only made sure they couldn’t interfere in your life. I’ll do the same thing with your father. More gently, because of what he is to you, but I’ll make sure he knows that any attempt to change your life is going to be met with my force.”  
  
Draco stared at him, his finger running absently, gently, up and down Harry’s thumb. Then he said, “It seems unfair.”  
  
“That I should protect you?” Harry cocked his head. “Well, if the rest of the world finds it unfair, then all they have to do is stop being your enemies, and then they don’t have to worry about anything like that.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “It seems unfair that I really did nothing to _earn_ this level of devotion and protection. And you’re ready to offer it to me, anyway.”  
  
“Oh, that’s easily explained,” Harry said, and slid a hand into his hair and tugged gently. “No one else is as adorable as you are, or as deserving of protection. If they were, I would have found them already, and be serving them.”  
  
Draco’s face went through a number of complicated expressions. Then he said, “I don’t like the word serving, not in that context. The Dark Lord used it all the time, and I don’t want to be like him.”  
  
Harry stepped back and bowed his head, spreading his hands. “As you wish.”  
  
Draco eyed him in suspicious silence. Finally, he said, “You would give in that easily? I thought getting your own way was all-important to you.”  
  
“No, _you’re_ all-important to me,” Harry corrected, wondering if he would have to give another long speech about how much he valued Draco before Draco would start taking him seriously. “I don’t know how you haven’t seen that yet. The way you act and react is a delight to me, and I want to go on giving you the freedom to do exactly as you please. Flint and Corinna and your father get in the way, and they’re pushed out of the way. More or less gently, depending on who they are and what they’re doing.”  
  
Draco opened his eyes wide, then closed them. “Only now do I begin to understand how devoted you are,” he said.  
  
Harry nodded. “Yes,” he said gently. “This is the kind of loyalty that the Ministry wanted to command from me, and never did. So use it wisely, Draco. Don’t do something that means I would have to stop you, or walk away from you for the good of the world.”  
  
Draco made a sharp little sound under his breath, and reached out his arms.  
  
Harry came into them, and held him. He wasn’t really sure who was comforting who. But they both needed to stand like that for a long time, and so they did.  
  
*  
  
Harry shut the door of Immortal’s holding cell carefully behind him. It had taken him all his knowledge to get here without setting off some ward, all his collected favors from the Ministry, and all his familiarity with Auror routines. If Kingsley had changed one thing in the weeks Harry had been gone, including the patrol schedule, then Harry was sure he would have been caught, Invisibility Cloak or no Invisibility Cloak.  
  
But he had come this far, and Immortal was standing up and smiling at him with bright mad eyes. Harry took Corinna’s sapphire from his pocket and bounced it up and down in his hand without speaking, looking thoughtfully at Immortal.  
  
“Why have you come back?” Immortal whispered. “Have you seen the true vision? Do you want to bring _him_ back?”  
  
“I want to give you a suitable body for your task,” Harry whispered back. The wards in the room would probably have let him shout and not be heard by anyone in the corridor, but whispering made Immortal’s eyes grow brighter, and that was the reaction Harry was looking for. “A body you can take the soul from.” He bounced the sapphire again, and this time Immortal looked at it, but didn’t react to it, turning immediately back to Harry’s face.  
  
“How could you get it here?” Immortal whispered, lowering his voice even more, as if he assumed that Harry would change his mind if he had to speak too loudly. “The Aurors would take it from you. They _must not_ take it from you—”  
  
Now his voice was rising, and wards or not, Harry didn’t want him getting too excited and neglecting the task at hand. Immortal was insane. If his mind wandered out on its own, it was too little to come back by itself. Harry gestured with the sapphire, and as he had thought it might, the light caught Immortal’s attention and calmed him down.  
  
“No,” Harry said. “They won’t question an Auror bringing in anything. And I have this gem. It can make people soft and sleepy. You feel it making _you_ soft and sleepy, don’t you?”  
  
Immortal blinked and shook his head a little. “If you’re an Auror,” he said, but didn’t complete the question.  
  
“Why am I sympathetic to you?” Harry smiled and brushed his fringe away from his forehead, waiting for a long, patient moment until Immortal’s eyes left the sapphire and focused on his scar. “Let’s say that you’re not the only one with a connection to _him_ , or a longing for his glory.”  
  
It wouldn’t have convinced anyone who wasn’t already half-mad, but luckily, that was Harry’s only audience. Immortal nodded and smiled, and then moved backwards, his hands spread. “I will await you here,” he said.  
  
Harry bit his tongue on the need to say something sarcastic about Immortal’s power of moving away from the cell, and slid the sapphire into his pocket. “You have to be ready to receive the body,” he insisted. “You have to perform the ritual as soon as you can. Can you do it by yourself?”  
  
Immortal nodded. “The full ritual is very complicated, but the small one can be done by anyone with familiarity with Slytherin’s magic,” he began.  
  
“Right,” Harry said, knowing that he would have to listen to the full babble and ramble otherwise. “I’ll leave you to it.” He gave a complicated kind of bow with his hands in front of him that wouldn’t mean anything but would look cool, and then departed.  
  
He did pause outside the cell to lay his wand on the wards and murmur the spell Draco had taught him, the one it turned out that he’d used when he and Harry visited the Ministry to sneak through the protections on Immortal’s cell. This particular version went in and disabled the wards that would have otherwise reported Harry’s little visit just now to the proper authorities.   
  
Harry was smiling as he went on his way. Useful things, spells, and even more useful, the right incentive to use certain ones.  
  
 _Like being in love._


	21. All Visions Fulfilled

  
"I still can't believe you're doing this."  
  
"I'm doing this for _you_." Harry winked over his shoulder and then walked around the Transfigured cushion one more time, studying it critically. "What do you think? Does this look enough like your father to fool a casual inspection?"  
  
"The inspection won't be casual," Draco muttered as he bent over what had to look like his father's corpse to him. Harry didn't blame him for flinching a little as he examined its dull, dead eyes, though at least he had the comfort of knowing they had never been alive.   
  
Harry nodded. "I know that. But Immortal doesn't know your father well. He just has to believe it's a body that's been put into a coma. Do you think it would pass for that?" He stepped further back, in case his magical signature or body temperature or anything else would disturb Draco as he made his search.  
  
Draco's fingers were sure and steady as he moved them across the body's throat, then looked into the eyes. Harry nodded again. He had suspected, when he first explained his plan and Draco didn't make much objection, that that meant Draco had experience working with Stunned people and others that his potions had put into a sort of deep coma.  
  
He and Harry would have to talk about that, of course. There was no reason that Draco, as the close partner of an Auror, should keep doing illegal things that put him at risk when Harry was willing to take the risks _for_ him. And there was also a difference between the sort of experimental potions that people kept to dose themselves and keep their minds safe from nightmares, and the sort they would use on other people.  
  
But Harry believed Draco when he said that he wanted to make a life for himself away from the illegal end of the Potions business. If only because Harry, by blowing up his contracts with Corinna and Flint, had come close to making it impossible for him to do otherwise.  
  
Finally, Draco sighed and leaned back on his heels. "I can't think of anything else that someone would check for," he admitted. "How did you get so good at Transfiguration? I remember you being rather pants at it in school."  
  
"I was all right, just not as good at it as I was at Defense," Harry corrected him. "Or Quidditch. Those are the two things everyone remembers about me. I would have expected _you_ to look beyond the surface, at least." He fluttered his eyelashes at Draco.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes, but he was smiling somewhere behind the mask. "And that doesn't answer the question."  
  
"I took a class with a master I paid, when I was in the Auror training program," Harry said. "There's no way that I would have passed some of the required classes and exams otherwise. And once he showed me ways that Transfigurations were similar to some of the magic I _was_ naturally talented at, then I became good."  
  
"This is better than good," Draco said, trailing his fingers through the Transfigured corpse's blond hair. "I would have said this _was_ him, on a casual glance."  
  
Harry smiled, and half-bowed his head. Draco's compliments still made him feel like he was being dipped in wine.  
  
Draco glanced up, seemed to recognize that, and hastily rose to his feet and cleared his throat. "So. You've got your body. What are you going to do next?"  
  
Harry opened his eyes very wide. "Why, isn't it obvious?" He bent down and cast a few spells that would make organs swell inside the Transfigured body, soft, puffy bags to resemble the lungs and a beating bag for the heart. Then another spell made it appear to breathe. "I'm going to give Immortal the body I promised him."  
  
*  
  
Draco insisted on coming along under the Invisibility Cloak to watch what Harry was doing, which didn't suit Harry, who had wanted to keep Draco safe. But Draco pointed out Harry had walked into danger when he went into the Ministry alone to see Immortal, and that Azkaban was probably more dangerous than this. Harry had to concede to that, though he was aware he didn't do it graciously.  
  
So Draco was behind him when Harry once again ducked and dodged through the Ministry, pressed under the Invisibility Cloak with Draco and trying to ignore his distracting scent and warmth. Once again, they reached the holding cell. There Draco proved his worth by watching Harry's back and the corridor for any sign of approaching Aurors while Harry disabled the wards on the cell again.  
  
 _I could grow used to acting and fighting with him._  
  
Hopefully, Harry thought as he pulled the door open, he would have long years of it to do so. Draco backed in behind him, and they shut the door.  
  
Harry slipped out from under the Cloak and stood in front of Immortal with his fake corpse. Immortal didn't question the way he had apparently appeared from nowhere. Of course, Harry thought, Immortal didn't question much of anything. He _did_ rise to his feet, greedy eyes on the false Lucius, and made a sound in his throat that might have been a polite question from anyone else. His face was glowing.  
  
"I told you I would bring you the perfect candidate," Harry said, and cast the body down in front of Immortal. He winced as the head bounced, even though this body had started "life" as a sofa cushion and was nothing more than a replica of Lucius. He had to admit that he was probably too sensitive for some aspects of plotting evil and leading a nefarious lifestyle.  
  
 _That's all right. Draco can compensate for me._  
  
Immortal bent down and ran his hands over the body's chest, murmuring and chuckling deep in his chest. Then he looked up at Harry. "His soul hasn't been taken already? Because he looks like the corpse of a Dementor's Kiss."  
  
Harry shook his head with what he thought was becoming firmness--becoming to himself, at least, and also to the plan. "I put him in a coma. He knows a lot of Dark magic, and he wasn't happy when he found out what his purpose would be. That made it unsafe for me to leave him awake."  
  
"You did rightly," Immortal said, and leaned back on his heels with a little laugh of exultation. Harry could feel Draco's shudder even though they no longer stood next to each other. "Rightly!"  
  
"Will you conduct the ritual now?" Harry asked. "Or do you need me to fetch something?" He hoped for the first answer. The more times he had to sneak into the cell, the riskier his plan became.  
  
"I can conduct it now," Immortal said, and rose to his feet with a loving smile down at "Lucius." "They think that they took all the potions and powders and ritual instruments I need from me. It is not so. The true initiate of Slytherin always has his tools with him." And he reached out and stuck his hand into a slit in the air.  
  
After a long moment of staring, Harry understood. It was a portable wizardspace, linked to Immortal and traveling wherever he traveled. It _had_ to be, though from what Harry understood by hearing the older Aurors discuss it, such a thing was theoretical only and had never actually been proven to exist.  
  
That a mad wizard had found a way around the magical laws and rules that Aurors had believed, until now, would restrict something like this was not a good sign. But Harry reminded himself to look simply interested. Immortal was paranoid, and he would notice too much strange behavior from someone who was supposed to be a supporter.  
  
Immortal stepped back, studied the body for a moment, and then struck down with a silver knife that unfolded along its length as it flew. In the end, it stuck through the false Lucius's heart, and pinned it. Harry could still hear the feigned beats flowing from it, though. He shuddered a little.  
  
"This is the simple part," Immortal said calmly. "It keeps the body in a state of pseudo-life while I get ready to destroy the soul."  
  
Harry waited a few more moments, while Immortal used other knives to inflict shallow cuts on the limbs and draw blood. He had arranged cups around the limbs to catch the blood when Harry decided this was enough.  
  
He stepped back and removed the blinding charms on the wards in the room as he bellowed, "What are you _doing_?"  
  
Immortal jerked to a stop, blinking at him. Draco had already fallen back towards the door, and he whipped the Cloak from his head now, pointing at Immortal. "What are you doing to my _father_?" He managed a credible wail.  
  
"Only--" Immortal seemed disconcerted by the way Draco had appeared out of nowhere in a way he hadn't been when Harry had done it. He looked down at the knife in his hand as though it had come there by itself, too.  
  
By now, someone was pounding on the door. Harry let Draco fling it dramatically open while he cried, "You're conducting a ritual to deprive someone of his _soul_? He doesn't deserve that, even if it _is_ Lucius Malfoy!"  
  
The Aurors piled into the room, and stared for a moment between Harry and Draco and Immortal and the apparent "Lucius" on the floor. Then two of them began to move towards Draco, but the rest of them had better sense and decided that the person actually conducting the soul-destroying ritual was the one they wanted to look at. In a moment, they surged forwards and surrounded Immortal.  
  
"He has a portable wizardspace," Harry said, in the tone of someone anxious to help.  
  
Immediately two of the Aurors cast a series of wards around Immortal that were meant to focus on a person's clothes and deprive them of the power of carrying anything dangerous. Immortal cried out like a bird with a broken wing when his knives and something else leaped away from his hand and clattered to the floor. Harry shook his head and kicked them out of reach.  
  
"You have to be careful with those insane Dark wizards," he told the Aurors in a tone of commiseration. "You never know what they'll do next."  
  
He received several grim nods in return, but the nearest Auror had crouched over the "corpse" and was doing his best to revive it. Harry saw the moment when he looked at the pierced heart and leaned back on his heels, sighing.  
  
"This is Lucius Malfoy?" the Auror asked, turning back and forth between Draco and Harry as though he wasn't sure which of them would be the best to ask.  
  
Draco bowed his head. "He was my father," he whispered, and then staggered as if he was about to faint.  
  
Harry leaped forwards to catch him. He saw some of the Aurors watching out of the corners of their eyes, and was sure that that dramatic rescue would end up on the front page of the _Prophet_ tomorrow. Probably with a faked photograph. Not that Harry minded, this one time.  
  
"He's just seen his father murdered," he told the Aurors who gaped. "We tried to get here early, and couldn't. We tried to catch the conspirators who brought Malfoy's father to him--one of whom used _my_ bloody appearance!-- and we _couldn't._ Could you show a _bit_ of respect?" He managed to put real anger in his voice. There were still too many of them staring at Draco as if he were the real criminal here, and with someone else as the blatant villain, that made Harry remember how it was probably going to be for Draco from now on.  
  
They scurried, after that, to cover up the "body" and wrap Immortal with spells and bonds so he couldn't do anything else. One of them finally Stunned him so that his babble about Harry being the one to bring him the body would shut up.  
  
Draco opened one eye as he lay in Harry's arms, where Harry rather liked having him. "Is it over?" he whispered.  
  
"Well begun." Harry stroked his hair back from his forehead, a gesture he could easily turn into checking for Draco's pallor if anyone asked him. "I'm proud of you."  
  
Draco gave him a wan smile and closed his eyes. He didn't have to do much acting to show that he was upset by this plan, Harry thought, and regretted asking him to go through with it for a moment.  
  
But Draco had made his choice, and Harry _was_ proud of him. It would have to be enough, for now.  
  
*  
  
"The story that you tried to spin for me looks more than a little unlikely, Harry."  
  
Kingsley leaned across his desk. Harry leaned back and lowered his eyes to the floor. There was a bit of silence. Draco and "Lucius" had been taken away the moment an Auror who could cast the proper spells had verified that Lucius was indeed dead. He had no one here to support him. He was alone.  
  
 _But I have someone to fight for._  
  
Harry bowed his head and took a huge breath. Then he said, "You're not going to like what I have to say, sir, but I have to tell you."  
  
He looked up to see that Kingsley's eyes had gone wary. He leaned back in his chair this time and kept his voice exquisitely neutral as he said, "An interesting beginning to an interview. Why don't you explain what you mean by that?"  
  
"You were the one who requested the interview, sir," Harry reminded him softly, and then drew out the letter he and Draco had found in Lucius's cell from his robe. "Do you want to read this? Do you recognize the handwriting?"  
  
Kingsley didn't read more than a line before he flung the letter to the desk. "Do you imagine that you can blackmail me with a pathetic forgery?" he demanded. "Do you _imagine_ that anyone would believe you? My hand's public. It's easily imitated. That doesn't mean _I_ wrote this letter!"  
  
Harry didn't take his eyes from his boss's face. "When I performed a spell that reveals the identity of the writer, your name was what appeared on the bottom of the page. I can show you the spell now, if you like."  
  
Kingsley stared at him, then at the letter again. "Someone must have imitated it," he whispered. "Someone must have interfered with the spell. There are spells that can do such things. There are clever Dark wizards. Look at Immortal, who we all thought was a madman, and his portable wizardspace."  
  
But his voice was sinking, and Harry nodded a little. Memory Charms almost always left an echo behind, though it might only be a dream or a sense of déjà vu. He didn't think Narcissa Malfoy was so skilled at them as to have avoided leaving that trace. "Yes, sir. You remember, don't you? That someone enchanted you and forced you to write this?"  
  
Kingsley closed his eyes. "Someone did. That means that I was responsible, in part, for bringing Lucius Malfoy to his death."  
  
"They could have used anyone," Harry said firmly. "They could have used me, except maybe they thought I was too recognizable and someone would remember every time I came to Azkaban." Not to mention his resistance to the Imperius Curse, but he thought he would keep mention of that out of his story. No need to encourage Kingsley to think about the details of how Narcissa had done this. "And they _did_ use my appearance to get into the Ministry and give that body to Immortal. Don't blame yourself, sir. The real villains are the ones who did this, who supported Immortal and made sure he could kill Malfoy. Pursue them instead."  
  
Kingsley nodded and opened his eyes. "You're right, Harry. We need to concentrate on that. We can do nothing now for the Malfoys except apologize." He sighed and touched his eyes with the back of his hand. "Do you know, I thought Malfoy's son was behind his disappearance at first? He seemed to idolize his father when he was young, and I thought he might want him free."  
  
Harry smiled gently. "I can say that his greatest desire is to be free of the shadow of his past." _Well, and maybe to have me at his side, but that's not the sort of thing you tell your boss._  
  
Kingsley nodded again. "Well. Does this mean that you're coming back to work with the Aurors full-time?" He glanced at Harry's stained hands.  
  
"I still need to find a way to get this curse off me," Harry said, not thinking that it mattered if Kingsley heard him call it a curse, now. "Malfoy has said--in gratitude for the way I tried to help him his father--that he might know a Potions master who could do it. But I'll come back after that."  
  
"Good." Kingsley stood up and extended his hand across the desk. "Because we need you on the team, Harry. Truth-telling ability or not."  
  
Harry smiled serenely at him and shook Kingsley's hand. "Happy to be back, sir."  
  
And he was. With a job inside the Ministry, he could make sure more easily that they didn't interfere in the Malfoys' lives, and that they believed Lucius was dead, and also that Narcissa Malfoy didn't get it into her head to do something else stupid and dangerous that might get Draco in trouble.  
  
 _All's well that ends well._


	22. About That Potions Master

  
"You promised me something, back at the beginning of this."  
  
Harry kept his voice soft, so that Draco wouldn't mistake his question for some kind of hectoring, punishing demand. Draco pushed himself up on his elbow anyway and watched Harry with gentle eyes. His hair was mussed from the bed, and Harry had discovered that when Draco looked like that, he was most likely to give in on small, unimportant things like questions of price.  
  
"Yes?" Draco yawned and pushed his hand down his forehead as if that would muffle his upwards-pointing hair. _Wrong direction,_ Harry thought, lounging beside him and loving him, watching him and devouring him. "What was that?"  
  
"The name of a Potions master who would be able to take this off my hands." Harry turned his stained hands over so that Draco could see the black palms.  
  
Draco bent down and flicked his tongue over Harry's palms, making Harry start and draw in his breath. Draco kept licking them, until Harry thought he would try to scrub off the stain with his tongue alone.  
  
Then Draco pulled back and looked him in the eyes. "Do you really want it gone?" he whispered. "It brought us together, and it told me I could trust you. I would understand if you wanted to keep it."  
  
Harry kept his eyes narrowed, watching Draco for a moment, because something about that earnest pronouncement seemed off. Then he understood, and snorted in laughter. "You bastard, you want me to keep it because the ability to tell when someone was lying would be _useful_ to you."  
  
"It would be very useful," Draco said, and coiled around him, his hands wandering and stroking Harry's shoulders as though he wanted to know all about the skin that wasn't marked by the exploding artifact as well as what was. "It's already proven its usefulness. It's helped you save my life. Why not keep it?"  
  
"Because it's annoying." Harry caught Draco's hands and stilled them so that he wouldn't get distracted. "I know why you want me to keep it, but I don't agree."  
  
"You said you would do anything for me, at one time." Draco looked down at him, his eyes distant and watchful. "Was that only a romantic story? Or an exaggeration? Were you lying to me without knowing it?"  
  
"There are things I won't do for you," Harry said, meeting his eyes. "Stand by while you murder someone. Let you sell illegal Potions ingredients that could get me, or you, in trouble just for having them in the house. Keep this curse."  
  
"Is seeing red light around everyone's heads _that_ annoying?" Draco ducked his head and rubbed his cheeks against Harry's hands. "It won you me."  
  
"No, my own persistence and ignoring of the word _no_ won you for me," Harry said, with a sharp shake of his head that got his hands away from Draco, stung Draco's cheeks with Harry's hair, and made Draco come up looking seriously displeased. "I'll do a lot of things for you. I've shown how much. You owe me the benefit of the doubt, and the payment you promised me in the first place. Or does a Slytherin break his word to his pledged Gryffindor lover?"  
  
"Slytherins break their words all the time," Draco muttered, and flopped down beside Harry, glaring at him from under a curl of white-blond hair.  
  
"I'm sure," Harry said, and kissed him on the shoulder. "But here's one who won't, or you'll find out how _unpleasant_ it can be to have me for a lover, right along with how nice it can be."  
  
Draco watched him through half-lidded eyes. Then he sighed, and hid his head in the crook of his arm, and said, "I'm not going to be able to dissuade you, am I? And I _would_ rather stay on your good side, after you've done so much for me and my family."  
  
Harry smiled, and petted his head.  
  
*  
  
In the end, Harry reckoned he wasn't entirely surprised to find himself standing with Draco outside a small, rundown cottage. When they were this close, he could feel the hum of glamours, powerful ones, and doubted the cottage was as ramshackle as it appeared, or as unguarded. Sure enough, they stepped into the garden, and the weight of potential curses, lightning that _could_ fall on them but chose not to, was as heavy as swimming underwater.  
  
Draco knocked on the window, not the door. They marinated some more in silence before the door swung open.  
  
"I told you never to bring him here." The voice was hoarse, and made Harry want to draw his wand--not from old memories, but recent ones. He refrained. Simply because people who sounded like that _usually_ wanted to kill him didn't mean it would happen this time. He strained his eyes in the dim light, trying to pick out the shape of someone hunched over a cauldron, but made out the man seated on the couch instead.  
  
"He's helped me a lot," Draco said, his voice shrunken and his head bowed with a respect Harry hadn't seen him give to anyone so far, including his parents. "He's changed, Severus. I thought he could be trusted with this secret."  
  
"What's to keep him from plaguing me for potions from now on?" Snape stood up and moved forwards. Yes, there were long scars on the side of his neck that would probably interfere with his voice, Harry thought. That and the pallor of his face made Harry wonder what sort of potions he had taken, to survive.  
  
"Because Draco is good enough at most of the ones I'd need, and he's more convenient," Harry answered.  
  
Snape paused and stared at him. Harry stared back, wondering if Snape had expected someone like the schoolboy he'd saved so many times. _The more fool him. Did he think that I wouldn't change with the years, just as he has?_  
  
Snape finally turned to Draco as if Harry had done something inexcusably wrong by speaking out of turn, and honestly, and continued his complaints. "Now that he knows I am alive, he will no doubt drag me back into public and attempt to get me honored with an Order of Merlin, and other attention that he must know I do not _want_."  
  
"That sounds idiotic," Harry said. "Why would I do that? If you've stayed here this long, out of the public's eye, then you don't want any kind of honors. And I have better things to do. Like Draco."  
  
Snape choked and stared at Draco. Harry could tell Draco was flushing, even in the darkness of the cottage; it practically stood out like its own red halo around his face. But he lifted his head and didn't falter before Snape's glare, which Harry had to admit was impressive in and of itself.  
  
"He's honest, Severus," Draco said. "Incurably honest. And he can tell when you're lying, at least right now. He wants a way to cure that. It happened when one of the Unspeakables' new artifacts exploded on him. Can you do that much for him?"  
  
Draco's calm, measured way of talking seemed to have its effect on Snape. He turned away from Draco and faced Harry. "You don't seem as surprised as I thought you would be to see me alive," he whisper-hissed at Harry.  
  
"The lack of a body was kind of a clue."  
  
Snape closed his eyes once, then turned and lit a lamp on a table nearby. Harry blinked as the warm light of oil flooded the room and showed it to be even shabbier than Harry had suspected. He would have bet the Potions lab was clean, though. "Let me see your hands."  
  
Harry held them out. Snape stooped over them, and Harry resisted the urge to roll his eyes. _God, you could at least clean your mouth out? Being bitten by a giant poisonous snake is no reason not to brush your teeth._  
  
Snape examined the dark stain and the way it followed Harry's fingers minutely, and then stood up and stared at him. "Is this some kind of joke?"  
  
"Yes, you know Draco, he lives to introduce Aurors to his hidden friends and fall over laughing at the result," Harry said.  
  
Snape turned back to Draco. "This artifact contains traces of mind-altering potions, and the Imperius Curse," he said. "You expect me to believe that they would _willingly_ expose their precious Chosen One to a Dark artifact of this strength? It is far more likely that Potter exploded the artifact on his own."  
  
"It was something they came up with and wanted all the Aurors to use," Harry said. This was the best that Snape could come up with, after years to think of and store the insults? Then again, Harry reckoned being alone most of the time _would_ be a way to atrophy your insult skills. "They claimed it would make it easy for us to tell when people we interviewed were telling lies. That's all I know about it."  
  
Snape bent closer to his hands, and Harry wrinkled his nose. Yes, some toothpaste would have been nice. He did catch Draco's eyes and refrain from speaking because it was expected of him, but he would be glad when he had made whatever promises Snape required not to speak of his being alive and was able to get the hell out of here.  
  
"I recognize one component of this," Snape said at last. "I will need the afternoon to brew the potion that will remove the stain. I presume you have important things you need to do?" He sneered at Harry.  
  
"The Ministry still has me on holiday right now because I tragically saw Lucius Malfoy murdered right in front of me," Harry said blandly. "I reckon I can spend those hours sitting on your couch if I _need_ to."  
  
Snape shot a startled look at Draco. Draco only shook his head in a way that said he would explain once they were alone, and hauled Snape through a door into what Harry thought must be the lab.  
  
Once he was alone, Harry lit the fire and cast some serious Cleaning Charms on the couch, then sat down and pulled the shrunken book he'd brought out of a robe pocket. The pocket was by Hannah Abbot, who had spent some time with Neville, and it included points and tips on relationships between people who'd had different Houses in Hogwarts. Harry hadn't reached the sections on Slytherin-Gryffindor relationships yet, but Hannah's writing style was easy and open, and he was enjoying it.  
  
*  
  
"You will need to come in and swallow the potion in _one gulp_ , Potter."  
  
Harry blinked and looked up. He'd been chuckling over Hannah's description of the different definitions Ravenclaws and Gryffindors had for "serious study," and hadn't heard Snape come out of the lab. Snape stood as far away from Harry as he could get and still extend the cup of boiling black potion towards him.  
  
"Offended I cleaned up?" Harry asked, taking the cup. "Don't worry, the soot and dust should be easy to restore."  
  
"Is it wise to speak that way to the Potions master who has brewed something you are about to drink?" Snape's voice was low and deadly, a hiss like the one he probably imagined venomous snakes used. Harry wanted to tell him snakes didn't sound like that and he should _know_ , after his close encounter with Nagini, but he wasn't in the business of educating idiots any longer.  
  
"If I die, it would hurt Draco." Harry held the cup to his lips and sniffed. It smelled like hot blackberries, not awful, but he was willing to bet it wouldn't taste that way. "I don't think you want to do that."  
  
Before Snape could retort, Harry swallowed. It wasn't as dreadful as the initial explosion of the artifact that had covered his hands with the black stuff, but unpleasant enough that he had to pinch his throat to avoid vomiting it back up. Snape was smirking, the smug bastard. Of course he was. Harry held his lips closed, and the tar stayed down. He looked at his hands.  
  
A moment later, the black stain began to melt, to fade into his skin as though someone was swiping his palms with an invisible sponge. Enthralled, Harry watched, and the stain faded from his fingers, too.  
  
"You owe me payment."  
  
Harry glanced up and raised an eyebrow. "We'll see about that. Say something that you know is a lie, so I can see what the reaction from my magic is."  
  
Snape only glared at him. Draco was the one who pushed forwards, with a faint sigh, and said, "My name is Harry Potter."  
  
No red glow, not even the slightest trace of crimson around his face, which Harry had been able to see when he was merely holding the artifact, before it exploded. He grinned and flung his arms around Draco, spinning him in a circle. Draco was breathless, flushed, and smiling when Harry let him go, though the smile vanished with the first words Snape rasped.  
  
"Shall I fear that you will try to repay _me,_ the Potions master who did the work, with something like that?"  
  
Harry turned around and fluttered his eyelashes. "Do you want something like that? I'm happy to give you that, if you'd like. I'm sure Draco won't object to a little kiss in a good cause." He started forwards, arms wide enough that he could have enveloped and stifled even Snape's desperate protesting motions.  
  
Draco seized his arm and said in his ear, " _Enough_."  
  
Harry wouldn't have yielded for anything Snape could have said, because there was too much old and broken and not right between them, but he could hear pain in Draco's voice. He squeezed Draco's arm and faced Snape again. "Thank you so much, sir," he said. He kept his voice bland, so that Snape couldn't even claim that Harry had "repaid" him with sarcasm. "Here you are." He pulled out the shrunken sack of Galleons he'd also brought, enlarged it, and dropped it at Snape's feet.  
  
Snape looked back and forth between the sack and Harry. Then he said, "How do you know that will pay for the least part of the ingredients?"  
  
"Because it would pay for a lot more research and ingredients-hunting than you had to do," Harry said indifferently, and turned away. The longer he looked at Snape, the sadder the man seemed, hiding out because he was afraid of the effort it would take to have himself declared a hero, jealous of the outside world and hating it at the same time. "Do you want to stay for a while, Draco? I'm going home."  
  
He had the sensation that Draco and Snape had a whole silent conversation while his back was turned, but Draco had joined him by the time he reached the doorway.  
  
They walked down the path and to the Apparition point in silence for a moment, and then Draco turned to him, sighed, and said, "He really is a good man."  
  
"He is to you," Harry corrected him, gently, because it was Draco. "He was a good Head of Slytherin House, and he's a great Potions master, and he tried to protect you. But he got my parents killed, and even though he objected when he realized Dumbledore's plans would kill me, he still went along with them. Made sure that I got the information I needed to sacrifice myself, even. I don't like him, Draco. I never will. But I'm perfectly happy to leave him to rot if that's what he wants."  
  
Draco walked beside him in silence, frowning. Harry said nothing. This was another area where he and Draco would disagree, and he thought the best thing to do was to let Draco ride it out. Draco might actually be _relieved_ when he realized that he could disagree with Harry and Harry wouldn't leave him for it. Sometimes Harry's devotion seemed to worry him.  
  
"I thought Severus was doing something great, or at least the only sensible thing he could, retreating like that," Draco whispered. "But in comparison to you...his insults seemed pathetic, this time. They never have, before."  
  
Harry took Draco's hand and bumped his shoulder into his. "It doesn't mean that you're pathetic for being grateful to him, you know. Any more than you are for liking me, or loving me, or whatever emotion we've arrived at today."  
  
Draco glanced up, grinning at last. "It's somewhere closer to love," he said. "At least until you say things like that. Git."  
  
Harry touched his shoulder again, and said, "So. Are you ready to go home?"  
  
Draco walked a few more steps, head bowed. Then he said, "No one's told my mother yet about what you did to save my father. She's going to hate owing you another debt."  
  
Harry shrugged. "Tell her that I collect it every time you fuck me."  
  
Draco choked. "I can't tell her _that_."  
  
"Then come up with something else." Harry turned and laid his hands on Draco's shoulders, vaguely hoping Snape could see them from his dirt-encrusted windows. "Do you understand that I _am_ yours, Draco, I'm just not yours for everything you can imagine?"  
  
Draco's hands hovered above his while his eyes searched Harry's. Then he smiled, and his hands came solidly down.  
  
"Yes," he said. "And I'm yours. For lots of reasons."  
  
Harry discovered that you _could_ kiss and Apparate at the same time, and that he was stunningly good at it. Draco, of course, was good at it as he was good at everything, and didn't miss a beat when they fell on Harry's couch, but started undressing Harry.  
  
 _It's good to be in love_ , Harry thought, and obligingly wriggled out of his shirt.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
